Welcome to 2022 and being Confident with Tech
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[00:00:00] We all had to learn to walk learn to talk, learn to write. Learn many different things. Tech is no different to that. You have to learn it. And if you didn't get taught it, how are you expected to figure it out?
[00:00:13] Be a learner and be okay with that, not to be feeling overwhelmed and made, to feel guilty because your grandchild can come up and do it way faster than you can.
[00:00:23] Hey there I'm Kylie Ross and let's get Confident with Tech. Welcome to the podcast. If you are an Entrepreneur, Small Business Owner or a Content Creator, like writer, blogger, photographer, artists, et cetera, you are welcome and totally in the right place to be more tech savvy and tech confident.
[00:00:41] In this podcast I will give you powerful action steps to automate your business processes with the ultimate goal, to save you time and frustration you can sell and scale your business with ease. Who wouldn't want that.
[00:01:00] Welcome to Confident with Tech, the podcast that will get your tech savvy and tech confident with your tech tools. You can automate to scale with these. You no longer need to be scared of your tech. I know many of you are, and I used to be as well. I didn't grow up with tech and I'm in my early fifties and what I've found over the years is if you want to learn, you will. As I said, I didn't grow up with tech. I went to high school in the early eighties. I was a high school dropout. At the time we didn't have mobile phones, we didn't have tablets. I didn't own a computer. I never even done computer studies at school. It was all paper diaries, and just remembering things.
[00:01:38] When I dropped out of school, I became a nanny, I studied to work in a bar and hospitality and I moved to the city and that's what I did. I worked in hospitality for almost five years.
[00:01:50] I decided I was going to do an accounting degree. I finished my year 12 as it is here in Australia. I went to university for three years and that's where I started to come across computers and I learned computers.
[00:02:01] The main thing was that I was keen to learn. I was interested.
[00:02:04] I ended up specializing in systems accounting and cost accounting. Systems accounting is where you need to know how all fits together. When this happens and it flows through and it all comes out at the end of the nice results in all the right buckets.
[00:02:17] And I ended up working in quite a lot of different industries. I started manufacturing and worked up and down east coast in Australia. I've also worked overseas. I've worked in New Zealand for quite a few years on a project over there and then I've been in the UK and I specifically worked in Scotland and the Republic of Ireland and traveled all around there for many years.
[00:02:36] I think I was traveling on and off for over 20 years. I realized everyone learns a different way and not everybody wants to learn the tech, change is scary. It can be really scary. But if you just take that first step, get comfortable with that one then the next one, then the next one. Soon it will snowball and you'll be going, oh yeah, if I press this button I can figure this out. Oh, good.
[00:02:57] And you get Tech Confident, and if I can put it into another example for you. I was in my late twenties, early thirties, and I'd been overseas and I'd been back and I worked on a new manufacturing site that was being built. It hadn't actually started production yet, but it was being built and it was all very much figuring things out with all the people there. They had people over from England as consulting experts in whatever they were making and how to build it all and put all the machinery together.
[00:03:28] And it was huge this plant. And there was a the warehouse, a supply person, he could drive the forklift and unpack things and and it needed to get where it needed to go.
[00:03:35] He started organising it. They said, oh, you can sort out the warehouse for us and we need, this and this to build this and can you go and sort it.
[00:03:41] Then he would have to get suppliers and da da da dada. He wasn't new to this industry, but he was new to management and to being a superviser even to this and what came down to is he needed to use the computer. He needed to use the accounting software that the organization used to record the inventory.
[00:03:58] What came in, what went out, where did it go? Who took it? And did they need to refund all that sort of stuff? And he'd never used a computer before. I was asked to train him up thinking, it will be easy and I thought it would be easy to, okay, let's go.
[00:04:11] But this person was almost 50 and he didn't really know how the mouse worked on a device. Let alone, using software. He could send an email, but even that was a bit, not something he did very often.
[00:04:23] At that stage I'd been training people quite a bit over the years. I said, all right, let's just, what do you do? We started with that and then we did the next thing, and then we did the next thing and he was just shaking in his, like literally shaking to be in this room with me.
[00:04:39] I don't know whether it was because I was much younger. I was a female or he was embarrassed. I don't really know why, but it's probably all of the above. He was just shaking in his boots. He said, I can't do this. I can't do this. I'm never going to do this. The thing that he really, what drove him though, is that we had lots of chats about this and building up the confidence, because if he could do this, then he was going to be the manager of the warehouse.
[00:05:05] He was going to get a really good promotion because he was the one in the know who set up this whole system and he knew physically where everything should go and how to lay it all out. And he can unpack the trucks with forklift and all that sort of stuff. It was just this one little bit that he needed to have to be able to be the manager.
[00:05:23] And that was the driving force for him to learn. He didn't want to at the beginning, but he it's. I want that. I want something better for myself. We sat down and sessions every morning. Good two weeks before he actually calmed down and started to get confident and think I can do this.
[00:05:38] And we just started, okay, what do we need to do today? We need to put 10 of those in, or you've got a whole truckload of that. Okay. This is, let's go to this screen and that screen. And what I like to do is. I got him to press the buttons, to use the mouse, to do everything. And it was slow going. It's you know yourself, if you go, oh, I'll just do this.
[00:05:57] It'll be much quicker, but that's not how people learn. They learn by doing. As you know yourself, you learnt to write, you learn to talk, you learnt to walk. You can only do that by doing. No one can tell you how to write. You have to practice. Same with the computer, no matter what app you're opening up, no matter what type of laptop someone says, this is the best thing since sliced bread, or you must have this laptop, or you must have this app, you still have to learn how to use it.
[00:06:22] There's always a learning curve. There always is. Anyway we sat down and did all this step-by-step and eventually he was going, oh, I've already done this today Kylie. I've done it and I went, oh, let's have a look, let's run a report and he went, oh, a report. And then we let a report and he got it. And it took, a good month of training going through all the different scenarios of what we have, he would do.
[00:06:42] But then it got to the stage where he would just ask a question. It wasn't like I needed to sit there and explain everything. And he got it. He became the manager and just before his 50th birthday and he was stoked and I was really happy for him as well. And I hadn't realized what an impact I'd made on him until he came to me and said, Kylie, I would, if you hadn't have pushed me, I wouldn't have been able to do this.
[00:07:03] I really thank you much. This is, this has changed my life. And but yeah, it's second nature to me, but I love to teach. Okay.
[00:07:11] If you want to learn, you will. That was the biggest takeaway I could get you to take from that story is that if you want to learn you will. It doesn't matter what level you're coming in at and where you're starting from. There's always more to learn. I have been doing this for years and I'm into this tech and that tech and I love to learn all the different apps and how could this make my life easier is the bottom line. If it can't make my life easier, I'm not interested.
[00:07:35] And I don't mind if it's paid because if I'm, if I can go and save myself an hour of work, I can reach out and sell my services or build a product to sell. I'm looking, always looking at that cost benefit of, will it save me time and money because it's got to do both. Otherwise it's not worth the effort.
[00:07:53] Take it easy on yourself. If you want to get tech savvy and be confident with your tech, this is the podcast to listen to learn some tricks and some tips and point you in the right direction of maybe some tech, that's going to be good for your tech toolkit and help you out.
[00:08:13] My aim is to make your life easier. If you can automate the busy work out of your day to day, then you can scale and you can make your life easier and then you can sell with ease. Who wouldn't want that? And anybody I say, anyone can be tech savvy. It doesn't tak a lot other than you need to want to learn. Okay.
[00:08:34] We all had to learn to walk learn to talk, learn to write. Learn many different things. Tech is no different to that. You have to learn it. And if you didn't get taught it, how are you expected to figure it out? You're not. And a lot of people go through this feeling of frustration and blocking it go, oh, I'm crap with tech. I can't do it.
[00:08:54] It's not that you are it's that you've never been shown how, and you've never had the opportunity to step back and be a learner and be okay with that, not to be feeling overwhelmed and made, to feel guilty because your grandchild can come up and do it way faster than you can.
[00:09:12] What we're going to do in the podcast is we're going to have a talk about all the different tech for all the different types of processes in your business.
[00:09:18] The way I break it down is that I've got seven pillars and I have a website called tech savvy creatives, and that's where you can find a lot more information and links to all the various social, YouTube, et cetera. That's called Tech Savvy Creatives.com. And the seven areas that I'd like to focus in or group the tech in, is your operations running your business things like your, to do list project management, how you who's going to do what. Content creation and sharing.
[00:09:47] What are you going to create is going to be YouTube, blogs, social media, podcast, online courses, physical products. What is it that you're creating? And then once you create it, how are you going to tell people about it? How are you going to share it? There's quite a lot of tools around and they range from the free to the not too expensive to the very expensive.
[00:10:06] And I'll take you through all the options because they're all relevant depending on what stage your business is at or where you're going to next. Okay. That's two. Operations running your business, content creation and sharing.
[00:10:17] The other ones now depend on if you're adding these streams into your business. Most businesses going online these days need to have some kind of passive income or semi-passive income. This all requires work. It's not completely passive, but once you've got it there, then the money can roll in. You don't have to recreate it. Things like online courses. Creating an online course and then how to monetize that or multiple courses.
[00:10:42] And in that you can also include things like Client Coaching. It could be teaching people how to do things like I'm teaching you how to use tech. I also offer one-to-one coaching. It could be that you have a product and that you've got a a physical brick and mortar store and you still need to create something for someone, or you need to get it from somewhere to sell it to someone.
[00:11:02] You're creating that atmosphere in your shop and you need ways to be able to share that experience with the people that they know that you're shopping. There's lots of different things. My main focus is on the online side of things, but we can extrapolate some of these tools for the physical.
[00:11:18] Now, the other things are a podcast, not everyone has considering doing that, but I think a lot of people are doing or adding this to their to their strategies, their marketing strategy, and it's free advertising. If you can get people in to listen, obviously. It's not difficult to do once you get a bit of a rhythm and which tools to use for which things.
[00:11:41] It's actually a lot easier than ever to get a podcast running. And it hardly costs anything. We're going to go through that and creating a website. You don't have to be super techie to do it. There are some really complicated ways to do it, and there's some really cheap ways and there's some in between and we're going to go through different options to see if you want to take the power back and manage your website yourself. Or what are the options for getting somebody else to manage that for you and what to look for and what to ask for and what to expect to pay that sort of thing. And if you want to become an expert, everyone's well, not everyone, but I'm hearing a lot of buzz about creating your own book, writing a non-fiction book and becoming the expert in your field.
[00:12:22] Sharing that knowledge with the world. It could be an ebook or print book, but the actual tech and the software to write it in, to format it and to get it out there and published, if you're going self publishing, there's quite a lot of really cool little apps that you can use to make your life a lot easier.
[00:12:40] Don't do it in word. Trust me. Don't do it in Microsoft word. We'll have a look at that. The other area that is one of my really big focuses at the moment is automating to scale. You have your operations, you're running your business, you're creating your content and you're sharing it.
[00:12:54] You might be creating an online course, a podcast, managing a website. You might be starting to write a book. You've got all these things going on and you may be doing it yourself. You may be in a team. It doesn't matter. There's options. All of this works for everybody.
[00:13:09] If you cannot automate pieces of that puzzle you're not going to scale. If you only have so many hours in a day physical hours, that you can work and hours and awake. And the whole point of an online business is to make your life easier. Not worse than being an employee. You don't want to be working all hours under the sun just to make a living, because it's not scalable.
[00:13:34] Physical one-to-one time, time for money is not scalable. Automating to scale is where all of this ends up. All of these other options funnel down into automating to scale. There's a lot of tools out there and there's a lot of different ways, you can put them together and you can then automate different processes and remove a lot of the busy work for you and/or your team.
[00:13:56] That way you can then spend more time doing the things that you enjoy and value adding into your life. If you can get things running on clockwork, if you can sell an online course, have everything go out to the person, give them the access and it's all online tutorials. You don't need a one-to-one at all.
[00:14:10] They just go, that's your passive income because you've built a product and you no longer have to manage it. You can sell that as many times as it's relevant. Same with a book.
[00:14:19] One-to-one coaching is a bit different because it's time for money, but you can also put packages together with online content that can replace some of that one-to-one as well, or most of the one-to-one. There's quite a lot of options and then you've got the automations of if you make a sale and it goes to say, Stripe or PayPal, you want that to automate into your financial software. You don't have to data enter that into your bookkeeping. I currently sell my online courses and one-to-one coaching on a platform called Kajabi, which is an all in one platform.
[00:14:53] My podcast is on there and it's great, it's all in one. When I make a sale on Kajabi and it goes to either Stripe or PayPal, I've got an automation with integration software called Integromat that updates QuickBooks online with the sale. It creates a customer if the customer doesn't exist and if it does it just skips that step and then it creates a sales receipt, immediately.
[00:15:19] I can see that everything has been paid the customer in my online course, the student has got access they're away and this can happen overnight. It can happen any time. I don't need to be involved. And that's where you've got your automation because now you create a course that all happened.
[00:15:35] You can then create another one, or you can write that book or you can spend some time doing one-to-one coaching and you've got all this other income coming in and on the side.
[00:15:42] That's where we're going with this podcast, and I'm going to come out to you each week and give you various different tools and use cases for the various different pillars that we're going through there. Now, if you want to have a bit of an idea about how to get started being tech savvy, tech confident I have got a five day challenge coming up on the 13th of February.
[00:16:08] I use ClickUp for my all-in-one to-do's project management software. It's very similar to Asana, Monday.com, Notion, Ayoa. I've tested them all out and from a price point cost benefit, and for all the features that you get for that, I think it's a clear winner.
[00:16:25] I'm a retired accountant now I did that for over 15 years and then I got into IT Consulting and implementing financial software in various different countries. Part of my role has always been teaching the users how to use that software, how to understand what use cases fit them and how to make the software do what it needs.
[00:16:45] I became a tech translator, and that's how I transitioned over into Tech Savvy Creatives. I used to be Excel this Excel that. I was an expert at it. I did formulas, macros, all sorts of things. The software has evolved greatly over the years, especially the financial software.
[00:17:03] It's now branched out into ERP systems. Enterprise resource planning, and you could have your HR, purchasing and supply chain contracts, all the bells and whistles, all the things. Implementing and teaching people how to do that was my thing. And I've moved away from spreadsheets because they're just, there to prone for error.
[00:17:25] It's data entry and it can get messy. We want to do away with that, and we want to make life easy. I created this about a year ago in click up
[00:17:34] I started creating all my list of tools that I have. What's on my laptop, I had over 120 apps, either online web apps or on my device and I thought that was insane. I'm sure you're listening at the garden 120 apps, how to use them all. And that was the thing I didn't use them all. I listed them all down. I categorised them and that's where I came up with these seven categories of types of tools and what I was using for.
[00:18:00] I categorize them down to the main categories and then I started, okay okay. Do I use them? Yes, no. I started clicking that down and then I wanted to know am I paying for stuff here that I just am not using and yeah, I was. But some of it, I had stopped the subscription or, it was a one time payment and then I decided I just didn't need it anymore.
[00:18:22] I listed down everything I paid for them. I went back through my records and okay. Even if it was a few years ago, I wanted to know what I'd paid for this stuff. And it was a bit scary. Then I started looking at okay. None that I've categorized things.
[00:18:36] What tools do the same thing and, oh my gosh, it's a bit of an eye opener when you actually figure that stuff out. To have it all there in this list, in click up.
[00:18:47] The challenge that I was talking about, the free five day challenge, you get the template for free click up is a web app and it also has a device app and you can use it on your smartphones and tablets, and it's a free forever version. You can pay for it, but it's a free forever version and my template works with the free forever version. You do need to sign up and get an account, but you don't have to pay for it unless of course you want to add features to it later, but you can use this all for free and I'll take you through with daily Q and A's and online tutorials.
[00:19:22] Not just how to list it down, but how to start analyzing it and working out what you can do with things. That's where I want to come in and I say okay, these two tools or these three tools they have similar features. Did you know that if you change your business process and just use this one, you could get rid of those two.
[00:19:40] This is how you can start to save brain space from going, what tool am I doing for what? Which is another thing that I really found is that I was I write non-fiction, I write blog posts, I was creating content, I was creating course materials and I was using all these different apps for it and nothing quite fit. I had to sit down and think about what's my business process and really just nut it down and go, okay what makes me happy? It's not because this is the best app because someone said, this is what wirters use, you must use that. It's what am I enjoying using? Because nobody likes to learn the same way.
[00:20:18] That's something that I've figured out quite early on in my career. I used to work in New Zealand. I grew up in Australia. I worked in New Zealand all around the UK, loved Scotland the best the Republic of Ireland and up and down the east coast of Australia. Worked in manufacturing industries, finance, education, I had to teach people how to do things and how to use the software and people learn differently. Depending on their personality, depending on their education, depending on whether they want to learn or not. And I found that the bottom line was, if you want to, you will, nothing else matters.
[00:20:51] Then you just need to tailor it to okay, are they a visual person? Do they like examples? Do they like facts and figures? Do they like lists? Once you get in the groove of how they like to learn things it's then very easy to translate it.
[00:21:03] Then I found that this toolkit can really help to organize my life and I figured out I'm going to share it with everybody else because it's going to help to organize yours as well. Starting off 2022, and if you're like most people on the net, January was that trial month that we're not going to talk about.
[00:21:19] We might think about starting in February, but you want to start to get organized and I know you're all out there and you're doing your business plans and your financial budgets and your sales forecasts, but what are you going to do to run all of that? How are you going to meet all of those plans?
[00:21:36] If you have gaps or limitations on your processes, on your workflows. Having a list of all of the tech and what it all does and which ones you're using for what can really start to free up some brain space and really get you going to say okay, I'm writing a blog. This is what I use and this is how I send it here and send it there because there's so many tools to help make your life easier.
[00:22:02] And I can't stress that enough. It's been my life for years to learn all these different tools and if you are interested in what a lot of the tools are, I do have a free resource on my website. It is a directory listing of all the tech tools that I've come across , that I use and recommend, and I'm adding to it every month.
[00:22:21] Once you sign up for it, it's free, it will update on a monthly basis. Now, if you go to www.techsavvycreatives.com/store, you will find it there at the top of the list in the freebies and templates.
[00:22:36] Okay. That's probably a lot to take in for the day.
[00:22:38] There's things that you can organize. Things you can get started with on you tech savvy journey. If you found today's episode useful, I would love you to screenshot and share your thoughts and please remember to subscribe wherever you listen.
[00:22:51] It really does mean a lot to me that you can find value in me sharing my experience and stories. Please tag me in I'm @techsavvycreatives on Instagram, and let me know where you're listening from. I'd love to hear how far this podcast has made it around the world. And also let me know what were your key takeaways from the episode.
[00:23:09] Thanks for showing up today and I'll talk to you the next episode. Bye.
