A Fellow Workflow Dork and I Chat Business Management:
Interview of Zlatko Bijelic
Content and Community, a podcast for entrepreneurs 🎧
Episode 6: Zlatko Bijelic founded a full-service Shopify agency, among other rad businesses, and we have something in common: we're both workflow dorks. We're passionate about smooth and efficient operations and love chatting about how to automate processes.
So that's what we did for this episode!
Enjoy our chat!
Episode recorded last year (2022)
Episode recorded last year (2022)
I sponsored this episode!
I'm so excited! I'm working on a course and a book that are both all about creating workflow-friendly content that can support multiple goals and multiple departments.
Sign up for email updates and I'll send you the links when when they're available for purchase.
Get more of my insights in my new patron program!
Once a month you'll receive a short video of me sharing some of my tips for community engagement and content development for business and a thank you for supporting my podcast.
Get your monthly insight video here.
Links to what Zlatko and I chatted about
Transcript
Ashley: Hi and welcome to the Content and Community podcast. I'm your host, Ashley Ashbee, and I chat with my guests about strategies and workflows to make informative content and community engagement possible and successful no matter how small your business is.
I'm working on both a course and a book to show you how to make content and community work for your business and this podcast is part of my research. Sign up at ashleyashbee.com/learn to get notified when you can buy them.
I recorded this episode last year with Zlatko Bijelic, who'd interviewed me for his podcast a year or two earlier. See the show notes for the link to that episode. I had a blast with him both times. Enjoy!
Zlatko: How you doing, Ashley?
Ashley: I'm good, I'm good! It's really awesome to talk to you again. I really enjoyed our last chat. Zlatko and I did a podcast for his podcast Tako Talks (Now called What is My Brain?).
We're both workflow dorks. So I thought it'd be really awesome to have him on to talk about
scaling your automations and your business development, and making sure you're on the right
track and all that fun stuff. So how's it been going with that?
Zlatko: Everything is good. No complaints here, honestly. Everything has been going. Well, we've
just been, you know, working I'm getting back on my podcast and got Guests coming on in the
next couple weeks. So yeah, just moving. Moving in that direction so no, no issues here. Nice.
So because I'm starting my own podcast, I've been thinking about you and wondering how you
juggle doing your podcasting and marketing stuff with the actual work. And how do you make
sure that you're not hiding? Make sure you're actually getting what you put into it instead of just
wasting time. You know, it's one of those things I actually took up took up my podcast as more
of a kind of just to be able to sort of chat with people and take my mind off everything else that's
going on. So it's more of like kind of like what do you call it? Like an Escape Route almost in a
sense and it's a time for me to kind of get into other people's heads and talk to them and all that
stuff. So it was actually more of like
It's really, really kind of healing in that way. To be honest with you, I'm always kind of talking to
people about what they're going through. So I can put myself self in their shoes and you know
it's just a really, really good outlet for me. And yeah, it's like a form of therapy. I go to like regular
therapy and then there's like, my podcast therapy and so this that's just like another Avenue for
me to just kind of, you know, dumb it down for myself a little bit. Nice. I think it's so important to
know what your expectations are. Yeah, obviously dictates how you'll spend time on it and all
that. And you are definitely good at at how do I explain it? There's like a journalistic kind of
quality to how you talk to people. It's very personal, but it's, you're definitely listening a lot. And I
think that's that's such a nice thing to have in these times like just to have a reason to talk to
people and
You know, that they'll set time for you and I'm finding that. So cathartic about running a podcast
so far as just being a just having a space to talk to people, it's been really helpful. Yeah,
absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. I appreciate the kind words there it's, you know, it's all a learning
process at the end of the day I think for for me and my and my team were always like looking for
different ways to just kind of have that work-life balance. And I think for me, Even though, you
know, some people would say that's a little bit of work but it's really not. It's just it's just, I always
really enjoyed those podcast. I always take Joe Rogan as one of the kind of Big Y. No. That's
like a really, really big podcast and that's like his life but it's just really refreshing to hear when,
you know, you can actually see the person like thinking about, you know, he's got all kinds of
guests on there and they're just talking.
They're two people talking and it's just really, really refreshing to see that and then I'll listen to
some that are more like formatted quote on quote and I don't really enjoy those that much. It
seems all really scripted and all this. So when I started my podcast, the one thing I really wanted
to make sure is to just make sure that people were heard and they were coming on to talk to me
about whatever, you know, we decide to talk about. And so that was always kind of my goal with
it. It's just just be, you know just being who you You are Peppa things so that was really
important. Nice. Yeah, I think but it's, when you take that organic approach, especially if you
already understand the concepts and you taken the time to know the person you don't even
have to prepare. Like, I mean, not that it's a good idea to be overly scripted, but I I do very to be
honest to very little prep for these, these podcasts, I get a refresher on what the person does
and what they're, you know, what makes them tick. But usually, if I have a guess,
Just because we're already on the same wavelength. So yeah, it's not like I have to like
Reroute, my brain and you have a conversation with them. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that's
that's really, really, really important too because at the end of the day sometimes like
conversations spark from different, you know, comments or just even questions and it just like,
I'm always I've had a few times where I'm like, oh, you know, I, you know, reach out this person
to the podcast and like these are the things I want to, you know, ask them because these are
the things I'm really interested about because I've seen maybe followed their Journey a little It,
whether it was like on Twitter or LinkedIn, or whatever it might be and then, you know, you come
to the conversation and you almost forget to ask those questions that you originally had. So for
me, it's always just been like, let's just go into it. Let's you know, do an intro type of thing or for
each person and then from there just let it carry on. So yeah, that's been really really important.
And yeah, it's been awesome actually.
I a lot of people knock the rabbit hole thing, but I'm a big fan of roubles cuz I think there's a
reason you go down them. It's not because you're bored. Well, I mean you might be bored. All
right, there's something peeking your interest and yeah, and it takes you somewhere where you
might not have a might not have otherwise gone. Like, I decide for I get so much intelligence for
my business. And I learned so much about my life, it's such a like a past of introspection. I find
ya. When I'm, when I'm kind of going somewhere where I didn't intend to go, and that's been a
really exciting part about doing. These podcasts is
Yeah, like the whole you you approached me on LinkedIn to do your podcast because you saw
a post. I wrote about workflows. Yeah and I start yeah, our car whole conversation, kind of
opened my eyes to different things I could be doing with my business and thinks that I should be
changing and different mindsets that I should try and I didn't go into that podcast Benny of that
goal in mind. It just kind of happened. That's the power of great conversation. I think all
marketing can have that Tall. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I definitely agree with that. I think podcast just
in itself are, you know, I'm good with that's why right before this call, we were talking about
things like Clubhouse, for example. And that's honestly, one of the things I really enjoy about it.
I'm always a really big fan of like the raw aspect of things. And with Clubhouse, you don't have
time to compose a message. You don't have time to chat with people and decide you it's literally
going into a room and listening to people talk you jumping. Midway in the conversation. You're,
you know, you're sitting in the audience and you're just listening and then things just start. Oh
my God. Damn, this person is doing this. And this person is doing that. And then you can look at
their like little bio their profile and Judith. Well, this person is actually, you know, done a lot with
their career or with their business, or whatever it might be, and I just really like that aspect of it.
Like I said, that's kind of the whole point of my podcast is that, you know, I get a chance to just
talk to people about anything and it can be as raw as
For one there's never been a time. Maybe once. Just somebody said something that they
wanted me to remove Badger attack but I don't even, you know, I don't even go in and edit
anything. I don't chop anything up. I don't, you know, put anything over it. I have one video guy
that just goes in and makes it just like the whole kind of look of it, a little bit better, but everything
else is just the, the, the audio, the video. Everything on there is completely raw and I think that's
where things are going back. Everything. Anything nowadays, everything kind of has this sugar
coating, you know, aspect to it. And I've just come to realize even even with our within my
agency, like we run a really, really awesome blog and it's, you know, pretty successful in this in
the sense of like getting people to read stuff and view it and viewers a month and all this other
stuff. But you know we just kind of try to go from an aspect of like what's a cool idea we could
talk about that we've been experiencing or something and that's like always really important
brother.
Going after something and it's being like, well these guys did this and we should probably, you
know, do this kind of topic and all that. Like, let's just build our own plane and if somebody
wants to look, read it. Cool. If they don't cool, like it doesn't, it doesn't, you know, obstruct us
from doing anything. So I'm just a really, really big fan of that. And so that's, that's kind of been
ingrained in me for long time, nice. But I really like about the taco talks blog is You're just solving
problems. You're not. Yes, you do. Talk about your experiences but they're in the context of the
problems that are experienced by the people. You serve or crit serve. Yeah, exactly. And like
informative content is it's not just more effective for making conversions and like helping people
consider to work with you or just you can just discover you but it's also just takes less time
because you're if you really know what you're doing. You can just you can just riff
That doesn't have to be like a formal thing. So, Exactly, I agree. Don't you don't have to
necessarily only blog about something because you know it has high as CEO potential. I mean
that's not really going to help you anyway. Yeah, exactly and those things are great when they
happen but I feel like at the end of the day that's not the ultimate you know thing to go after
because of you know it's I think this is feel like sometimes the harder you try, the less, you get
out of it, sometimes you can do. So you'll be surprised. It's like I was I have this thing that I
usually say, I say too.
12:04 a.m.
Everybody now, Me or anything like that, but just like everybody my family everybody and I just
say expectations are resentments waiting to happen and it's like you can go in and expect
everything you possibly can, you know, want to. But that some demented, there's something
happens, it just happens. And if you don't expect anything and then when anything happens,
you'll be actually surprised or or happy about it. So if you go in and you know, I'm going to go in
and win the lottery tomorrow and it's going to be, you know, five hundred million dollars. Lottery
ticket and you're like, I'm going to buy these things. I'm going to help my family and I'm going to
do all these, you know, then when you walk out of there, when you have to check your ticket
and just there's nothing there, then it's just like okay well I didn't win what am I going to do now?
But if you want in there and just say I'm going to buy a lottery ticket you walk out you could get
about it then you check it seven days later and you win something even if it's $50. It's a it's a it's
actually a happy surprise. It's a pleasant surprise. So I'm always a really big fan of having
Minimal amount of expectations whenever we do anything for myself for my business. So nice. I
am too and I think I mean, I'm a big fan of weighing value Against Time and Labor. So for
example, yes, there there is a potential to get a client from someone who's never heard of your
business, but just by seeing an article like ranking high in Google. But if you compare that to
like, Because that person is totally cold, there's actually some extra work involved to earn their
trust and credibility. So it might actually, there might actually be more time and labor costs
involved in nurturing. Them and onboarding that whereas, if you take a more nurturing approach
and focus on fake Focus, your inbound marketing on people who already know who you are, or
have some sort of rapport with you because you Mutual connections or whatever. And that's
how people discover you. There's Already a little bit of credibility there and so you don't have to
do as much work to warm them. Yes, I already kind of there already kind of in the consideration
stage. So, yeah, I think focusing too much on things, like SEO instead of things that you just
organically no through working with clients. I think it's it's probably a big mistake. I don't know
how bad it is, but exactly exactly. So yeah, it's a big thing. It's a big thing for sure. Nice, are you?
Just forgot what I was going to ask you. That's okay it happens. Yeah it happens. What do you
do to automate your? Because I know you run a team. So in terms of like delegating certain
tasks for sales or Business Development or marketing like what how do you do that? What's
that workflow look like for you or you know, what tools. Do you use, who were use a tweezer
good amount of tools actually so shy. Or for marketing, and kind of like, our sales process and,
you know, all of those things like are, you know, social media, side of things. We are really,
really big fans of HubSpot. That's like our go-to piece of software. That's where we do our, you
know, our sales deals go through. There are contact form on our website is is all HubSpot, so it
feeds everything into into our system. So that's like a really big piece of it. And then aside from
that we use slack for like our internal Communications. So slack is just kind of our go-to tool
because we can have everything kind of funneling into there as well. So anything that comes
through HubSpot shows up in slack, we can get on it really quickly and then for support tickets
when clients need to reach out to us or, you know, or anything like that, we use zendesk.
So that, you know, in even if somebody goes through our contact form on our website on Taco
agency.com, if anybody goes on there and submits anything, it actually automatically opens up
a ticket in our zendesk system and we use that heat. Yeah. And so then that all kind of comes
into slack and then you know, whoever the person that usually a project manager or even I'll
jump in and just answer certain things. Sore, get in touch with the person but Yeah, it's either
project manager Ops person that goes in there and kind of initiate that conversation with the
with the potential client or an existing client and stuff like that. So that's kind of our flow primarily
and then you know, like documents and all that is obviously like in Google Drive because we're
on on the Google system as like for email and all that stuff. So hops. But I would say it's kind of
our big hub for for all of those things that funnel out into different It into different pieces. Nice?
Yeah, I've been yeah.
I've been looking at a bunch of things like, so I want to use dips Auto. I'm still not quite there yet,
because it's just, I still have to create all the workflows for it, and I just hasn't been a priority yet
and like gumroad and everything. And I'm almost, I'm not really sure how well, those things
were together yet, because, I don't see a ton of Integrations for them. So, I'm kind of looking into
There are tools you can use to actually create Integrations. So if zapier doesn't have like a
native integration with this trigger, for this action, there's things that you can do to like make that
integration for you and so I'm looking into that as a possible thing. Like just weighing the time to
learn and build it, build it against the time, you know the value, I'd get out of being able to do
certain things that are not natively available, either through the platform's themselves or through
zapier. So does anyone on T on your team? Do that or do you focus on on Integrations? That
already exist?
Zlatko: No, we used as a pure for pretty much everything. So like HubSpot connecting
Zlatko: No, we used as a pure for pretty much everything. So like HubSpot connecting
to like zendesk and all that stuff through zapier. Yeah, we use it. I mean, I have like I have
certain workflows in there that probably saved me like 5 hours a week of time in terms of like
flows. Like I have one that's like, like a 16 InStep flow that like goes in and updates. A bunch of
stuff based on actions from other software pieces and all that stuff. So, yeah, we use that very
heavily on our end like really, really heavily to connect kind of everything. So the reason why we
really like HubSpot is because we use hop step for a Time tracking, so it's
might get confused with it sometimes. But with the reason why we use HubSpot primarily for
everything is because they're just a very And I used others like CRM and sales and, you know,
tools and stuff like that. They just have a really, really good, ux flow of like how things are set up.
I was actually just really the recently listening to their CEO talk. And I was really happy to hear
that. He's like very focused on like the user experience. So they just have everything dialed in
really, really well, and it's very responsive in terms of like, you know, Things don't take ages to
load and you know, all this other stuff. It does get pretty expensive at some point like, depending
on what like tools you're using. But they really have everything in like a One-Stop shop, like you
can, you know, send quotes and you can kind of tie those into the deals that you have. And
when somebody pays for something, it will close the feel for you. And like so just those little
things that you wouldn't think like because, you know, we've gone to the process of like having
to move things over manually.
This, you know, this project came in, we got to move it to this Lane and all this other stuff. With
with HubSpot, we get to automate a lot of that stuff. And it really does have a like, a lot of native
Integrations with things. And it also has a really high and integration with happier, which you can
do pretty much anything. You've been like based on like form submissions and you know deals
and you know all this other stuff. So I just really am like happier with in we moved over Over to it
like about a year and a half ago, maybe a little bit longer at this point and I would never think
about moving off bit. Like there's just a there industry leader, in my opinion, some people may
think it's Overkill. There's so many things going on in there, but they just work really, really well
nice. I guess if people wanted to study using this or any tool,
They have to look at the costs involved. Running it and then weigh that against the time they
could save and how much that time costs and not just the time you could say about how you
can scale things because you have that time and you don't have to hire people to do certain
things and Yeah, that that that calculation I think is so important. And also, I find I find I'm kind of
speaking for myself, but I find a lot of people don't do that calculating. They just let go, you can
get a return but they don't necessarily look at, you know what, what is, what kind of scaling or
what kind of price points are required to make that profitable? So do you have any tips for
anyone for making that evaluation? Like, is there a simple formula? That's people should keep
in mind. Is there to love this shit?
Is to track that kind of value. I don't know if there's necessarily a tool, but I will say that like for
me it was always the reason why we moved over to her because we were using, like five
different tools for five different things you can do, you have your social media management like
that's one tool, then you have, you know, your email marketing. That's like usually another tool
when you do all these things and then when you kind of combine everything, Price is like gets
really, you know, and we have a larger team. So, for us, it's like I can't just buy one. See, and
share that across the end. Some of these software pieces of forgotten, really smart about that.
It's like one person is logged into me. Can't have the same person logged in, under the same
username. And it's like, okay, now we got to find another seat and then there's going to be
another person that's going to want to get in there and do stuff and we got to buy another scene
in by the time you look over. You're paying $150 for this piece of software doing one thing which
is social media. But with me, it was always like, how do I consolidate this? So, when I'm onboarding people and bring
people on to our team and want to give them like the full scope of like our business. And what
we're doing, how do I just consolidate That Into, You Know, One Piece where I can say here's
access and everything lives here and that was always the kind of like a really big struggle and
so when we moved over to HubSpot like I can literally give somebody access and a usually I
think it's like 30 bucks per person. Person. And it will give them literally the whole, the whole
ensemble of like our systems and everything that's going on. So that was always like a really big
piece to me because then it just it stretches out everything and stretches out the onboarding
and stretches out the, you know, the systems and people learning and how is this connected to
this? And are we tracking this? And at some point, you know, when like we run our blog off of
HubSpot to because they have like a CMS system in there and
Run our blog from there. So we can actually track, you know, users based on certain campaigns
that we run across. Social media are our blog, and our emails and all that stuff. And like the data
is all, there's a sense of data Integrity there and keeping everything in one place where we don't
have to go look at. Okay, so this thing got like, 50, you know, comments on it on one platform.
But how did I emailed you compare to that? Or how's that data all combined? And now we need
another tool to bring all that together. It's just becomes this big mess of fragmented system. So,
I'm always, I'm always willing to and when you turn around and look at it, hot spot was actually
cheaper than going with all these multiple systems that we want to do, you know, kind of have to
run our business. So that was always like a big piece to me and so, you know, you can sit there
and start calculating things but I think took until you start using it and try to start seeing like
Every single day that you're, you know, you're making your life easier at that point. It just
becomes a just becomes a no-brainer, nice. So I think people should always familiarize
themselves with everything, the school, the tool can do. Like, now just look at all its features.
But look at all the problems that can solve. And if you're not sure, if you can get a return on it
that month or whatever, and that's sort of like a deal-breaker for you, you know. Like if you really
don't want to put things on credit like that's that's One thing you can do, you can figure out. Well,
what problems is this going to solve that? I otherwise would still be dealing with or how can I
scale with this combination of problem-solving things that you know, maybe I otherwise couldn't
do because or he couldn't even measure necessarily because if you're using a bunch of
different tools, to measure things, each tool has its own, like unit of measurement. So you can't
even really compare apples to apples. So you can't even really track like, how well things.
Are working properly. So right, right. Exactly. And that's that's a really, really big piece. That's a
really, really big piece. Yeah, you just, you know, especially when everybody wants to have like,
you know, a view of what's going on, it's a good thing to have it all in one place. It just makes
things that much easier. Nice, I imagine another benefit would be if you if your capacity became
kind of out of sync with Your workload, you know, like if you had like if you're if your workload
Ebbs and flows and all of a sudden you have all these extra clients to deal with and you need to
suddenly on board, all these Freelancers and you need to get the next two things that would be
much easier. If all you have to do is open up a few seats instead, right? Having to do that across
different platforms, variants different workflows if they're doing different things. Yeah, it's that
exact. That would that would dictate in a way probably. How how, how You can scale or how
quickly your you might have to turn down work or something. If you just physically, can't don't
have the project management project management bandwidth or it? Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah,
it's a really big piece. It's a really big piece ice. I didn't know you could have, I didn't know how to
spot had a CMS. That's really cool. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So you can actually build your entire
website on there too, but we just the block feature ER nice and how does that work with your
website to you? Embedded or do you like connect it to your domain or how does that work? We
so you know we use a sub domain. So blog dot Taco, agency.com will take you to our blog and
then our main website is just Taco agency.com. So, yeah, that's that's how we that's how we
connect. It's just much easier that way for us because like for example, our website is because
we are a Shopify agency. So we just thought that like we always In this like we drink our own
medicine and recommendation. So like our website is actually built even though it's not an e-
commerce store, our website is actually built on Shopify. So and and we were for Shopify
partner and I'm we're shopping with my partner and a HubSpot partner. So we use those tools
and we become partners with these companies from a development perspective or just like a
marketing perspective because of the fact that we, you know, So we can go out and, and really
talk about it and, you know, tell people like how to use it and all this other stuff. So we're not just
like selling stuff that we have no idea on how to have it, you know, work it and all this other stuff.
So yeah, that that's how we have our stuff set up. Nice shopify's, a really nice tool. I had it for a
couple of months a few years ago just to experiment and see how everything worked. And I
noticed then and I'm noticing outs to the Third. So many Integrations for so many different things
that you can have memberships. You can you can connect to so many things as an experiment.
I actually connected Shopify to one of their apps which was a camera what it was called but it's
a Drop Shipping at. And so I sold a couple of things and I was so easy and I didn't have to I
didn't have to get a new program for it. I literally just sign up for the app and I think I had to fill
out like a use. Your agreement or something, but I was literally the only Administration involved
with that kind of thing. So that's exactly exactly. A Shopify is great and they're growing
exponentially every single every single day almost at to like so yeah. It's a really, really great
tool and hence what it's like one of the reasons why, you know, we should do development and
all that stuff or excuse me on different platforms, like woocommerce, and Magento, and all this
other stuff and it just came became really Really, really obvious. That Shopify was kind of
leading the pack in all of this, especially when it comes to people that didn't want to have, you
know, these like heavy and heavy back and Engineers handling their store and being, and the
merchants being so, develop toward about dependence. So, like doing some pool things as
changing images and buttons and text and all this other stuff like everything had to go through
like a full deployment process and you know, all this other stuff. Stuff with Shopify. Like you can
literally teach our, you know, our clients, how to do certain small things themselves for like
marketing purposes. So to us, it was just like very obvious that we wanted to focus on building
out a cool store for people doing the design efforts and development efforts, and then just kind
of set them on their way to manage things going forward from a, from a low-end perspective and
kind of the marketing side. And if they needed anything else from us, like, in terms of
development or Integrations or customizations, and, you know, we Jump in and handle that. So
yeah, Shopify is an amazing tool than you know, we work very closely with them at their Shopify
plus team and all that stuff. So nice. Yeah, I I still am yet to publish anything, but I'm I'm going
some interest to an e-commerce fruit with my business. And one of the reasons I switched from
WordPress to do to was that because we're Russ's open source, and And, you know, like you
the shared hosting that you get with, you know, any regular website isn't really secure enough to
manage the needs of everything. So you need to get like a VPS with a firewall and then you
need to set up all these things to prevent Brute Force attacks and you need to, you know, get
out. You do not just boo Commerce, but like three different apps to make everything work, and
then you have to connect it to something else. And then it's, you have to Set up all these things.
Their domains that it's not going to block any of her Pages, or whatever it just became this, this
nightmare was the, there's so many things to manage. And I would be so expensive and I
wouldn't even know if I'd be able to get a return on it. So, yeah, yeah, it was attractive attracted
to have everything under one domain, but like, like natively through my own website but it just
financially didn't really make any sense. So yeah, it's one, it's one of those things. That's literally
like everything on that on what you mentioned, a Shopify does that on their end and the the
merchant never has to worry about that. It's pretty missing. Yeah. Nice. And I if I remember
there are prices are pretty affordable, so you wouldn't even really need to make a lot of sales to
break even. So it's very, very low risk. I think that's, that's really valuable for a lot of people who
are testing is like, do they want to take a risk on something that's really expensive and they
might just end up being
I can expense on their credit card or, you know, I guess it depends on how much money you
have to work with, and how big the risk is. I think, I think most people starting that eCommerce
business can definitely afford, twenty-nine ninety-nine a month and that will get them going. And
so, yeah, it's, it's pretty pretty crazy. Nice, nice, nice, nice. How do you?
12:26 a.m.
You mentioned. Did you know if they have any Integrations for keeping track of potential clients
or whatever or is it everything natively there and you have to copy names to find? Yeah
whatever. Yeah. You you literally can connect People to People connect their what's it called
their profiles like their Twitter and Instagram links in there. But everything else like the profiles
are just like, static text. It's just Just you can't like you can place any links or anything like that.
It's very much like conversation based. So yeah, it's very manual but like you have to take
people off the platform to like have a contacting. And I think that's smart actually because at the
end of the day, it's like if everything was on clubhouse and it's just like another, you know,
another Network, building Community Building thing, and then you have the messages there,
your messages on Instagram, your messages on Twitter, your messages on LinkedIn, you have
mess. Like it just becomes this like, just like this hassle again fragments and all over the place,
so they just kind of wanted to focus, I think on, hey, we hold conversations, people talk and then
whatever you want to do after that, go for it. Nice. I do struggle with managing different. Direct
messages from different platforms. Yeah, and that's why, that's why wouldn't when you reached
out to me about the Lincoln's, like LinkedIn, I get so many different people. Reaching out about
like recruiting and all this other stuff and I just get so bogged down that I had to turn off all of my
notifications because I just, I was just getting bombarded with stuff. And so when I do go on and
check, I literally will spend like 10 20 minutes, go through everything and just get off of it again
because it just comes in like piles of piles of crap. Nice. Yeah.
I'm I'm sorry, I'm not a huge fan of message box, but I think they do kind of have their place, you
know. It's you don't want to disable your messaging but at the same time it's as you say, if you're
not there for specific reasons it just becomes a Time killer. So I do wonder if maybe in the future.
There might be some sort of message ba for social media platforms. You know, there's
obviously have to be rules because you know, you could use it to spam people or Every word, it
could hurt, organic, communication, that yeah. Yeah. There has to be a better way to do this,
like, it just takes so much. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And yeah, it's not easy, it's not an easy
problem to solve, but hopefully, they'll figure something out because it's just getting its getting
pretty. I mean, I know that now, that like, Facebook is combining their messenger, with their
Instagram, which makes sense because they're all the one company and all this other stuff. But
like, man, there's so many A of them out there. It's crazy. Yeah, I wonder if there could be, I'm
not sure if legally this could even work that, you know how you can you can you can send
different if you owned your own separate email accounts, you can have email forwarded to your
other. Yeah. When it be cool. If social media Accounts at something like that where you could
just put it in like a central external Hub and like connect all your accounts or whatever? Yeah.
That would be cool. That would be really cool but
You just like, you know, they're constantly releasing all these new like features and all this other
stuff so you might miss out on some of those things as well. So it's kind of a, you know, it's a
double-edged sword. I guess, at that point, to be honest. Yeah, because it's one of the benefits
like I'm I'm always saying people should only focus on one or two social media platforms. If any
it might not even be important to you at all but but that's one of the reasons because it's not just
about the time posting and the time engaging but You have all this other workflow stuff involved.
Yeah, yeah exactly. Exactly. There's a lot going on. There's a lot going on for sure. And it's just.
Yeah, if you if you focus on one or two of them, that's great. But then you know it depending on
what kind of it's all depends on what kind of business you're looking to run or what you're doing.
But you know, you want to try to maximize that as well, depending on how you're posting and all
this. That's why I'm, you know,
Like I'm a big fan of again, I'm going to go back to saying, like, the whole HubSpot thing that's
because we can use that to leverage all of the social media outlets. And then just, you know, if
we want to reply to things like we don't have to be on all of them. We can just like, post up to
LinkedIn and just let it go. Like just to have that content accessibility but at the end of the day
like if we need to comment on something or somebody PM's us or something, it's probably
going to be on Twitter or Instagram and most of us have that on our phones and we could just
get on it really quickly. So,
You know, it's just a thing. Comes down to that point to nice. Yeah. That sounds easier than for
me to do it all on my own, so I feel answer. Yeah. Well, I'm telling you, there's definitely tools out
there to to minimize that. You post it once, and it goes everywhere. Rather than doing it to all of
these other, you know, outlets and all that stuff. So yeah. I mean more like Community
engagements solo? Yeah. Yeah. That's sort of saying it's yeah. If there would be some way to
have a platform where I could do all that engagement stuff in one place, I don't know if that
would be ever be allowed for the apis for those platforms because I think it has the opportunity
to be of use, but I don't know. It's interesting. I feel like there's some things going to come out to
make this stuff more efficient. Yeah. There should be something for sure, for sure.
Nice. Nice, nice. Nice, another. Something else that I wanted to ask you. Yeah, anything. Oh,
right. You mentioned, I think Offline that you have, is there a, is there a clicking sound on your
end? No, I don't think so, not, you're not using your mouse or anything. No, no, I'm just weird.
Okay, that's okay. I'll just edit that when I'm doing good, I'll just edit that. Oh, I don't know. - that's
weird. Yeah, that is weird. I didn't hear anything. Yeah, interesting, maybe it's a anyway. I'm sure
that that probably picked that up there on the Perils of having a wireless mouse and just goes
everywhere. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's what I was going to ask you for your Zoom. Are your Zoom
meetings for your podcast. Do you have someone who does the splits? Green for you. Or do
you use a platform for that? That honestly that's kind of the beauty of Zoom is that when you're
done with with the recording, it splits that for you and releases the video and audio as one, and
then separates the audio and the video to two separate file. So you basically get a folder like a
zip folder of all those assets into different formats or they can use whatever you need to nice.
Yeah, what There. I was looking at that for doing the podcast but I'm just a little bit like the tool
I'm using now Squad cast, you it records locally? Through each person. So two separate tracks
and it only it only puts it, and it's into the cloud. Once the recording is done. So, you don't know
the risks of, you know, how was you Murr Skype or whatever you can have dropouts? Yeah,
yeah, yeah. There can be connection. And she was like, the occasional little blip or whatever,
but it's they're much less likely to happen and then they're not as prominent plus you can. Yeah,
it's that, I don't know. I like it so far, but I've never run as a podcast on seem so I don't know.
Yeah, sometimes it's a little tough. Like sometimes people were like, well, I don't have to zoom
install, the not going to install it or, you know, let's do it on Google Hangouts and Google
Hangouts. Quality is not that good and so there's just a lot there that I think, you know, there
needs to be like us. Somebody sent me not too long ago some like online like web-based
platform that does like basically what Zoom does. But it's just kind of like like Squad cats, were
you going to link and then you can just do everything there but I didn't get to use it just yet, so
maybe I'll just do that for one of my next podcast or something. Yeah, yeah. One of the reasons
I like it seems like every guest so far has been really glad that they don't have to sign up for a
platform. They don't have to sign into anything. They don't have to open a new app. Everything
in this is like in a browser. They literally just have to click a link. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly.
So you know that that always mix look life, little bit, I'm a fan of web-based stuff for sure for sure.
Yeah, I wish more more apps were had mobile-friendly versions because I find it. So I don't
know if you write a fever written on medium or do you know anyone who's written a medium?
Yeah. Yeah. I know medium. I read a lot of stuff on there. Nice. So, one of the things that that
really irks me about medium, I love writing for and I love reading at, I get great insights every
time, but their mobile app and their mobile website. I don't have like, half of the Really essential
things you need to engage for that platform. So to get the full use of it, either have to use the
mobile website. If I want to check out how much money is something made on the certain day,
or there's certain things that if I want to sort of lay out or I want to see everything I need to do. I
actually need to open like the desktop version in my phone. Yeah. So I don't know if you ever do
that on your phone. You know, I think probably using My iPhone, right? Because your
Clubhouse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, in Chrome, you can just click this little box in the
settings that can open it and desktop view. It's I find that really helpful in some ways. It's the
same time, it makes me angry that I even need to do that because it's like the most fundamental
things are not often, not available mobile. I always think about how I always think of the time
when Apple first release their iPhone and they didn't have a copy and paste option. I'm like how
did
12:36 a.m.
It literally took them. I think like five months to like really thick copy and paste option. I
remember there being like a damn celebration when that happened. I was like wow. So yeah
yeah it's so weirdest thing that like a lot of companies have all these bells and whistles but
they'd often don't think of like the most fundamental things that you really need to actually get
any value out of something. Yeah, exactly, it's crazy. So I don't know, I don't know, it's just it's a
weird. It's a weird concept. Nice. Yeah. So what's what's on the agenda for taco toxin your next
quarter? Do you do do things quarterly or does it all depend on how many clients you have or
well for the agency for taco agency? We were basically right now just focused on our kind of our
growth. We've been growing pretty rapidly. We're hiring a few new developers in the coming
weeks and yeah that's
That's pretty much on the on the agency side were also releasing a product, which actually, I
think you might, you might find useful for kind of what you're doing. So, kind of talking about all
of these different sort of tools that people are using, you know, task management, tools and
calendars. And, you know, Social Media stuff and all this. As an agency, we've always kind of
run into the issue of Of, you know, for example, we have a support ticket system, we have a
task management tool that doesn't give the client access to it. That's like our internal tool. Then
we have like, Google drive or all are all of our files, sit and all this other stuff and we've run
across, you know, quite a few clients that you know, in the beginning of the project will, you
know, either pitch something to them. Like here's what we should do. They'll maybe like reject it
or say no and then you know three months into the project will come back around.
And say, I want this and blah, blah blah, and all this other stuff. And so we just came to a point
where, you know, it was like hard to keep track of where all of those conversations happened.
So, sometimes the client will email one of us directly and we're like no you need to like, send it
here and so that goes into our ticket system and you know, all this other stuff. So and again, we
lay all of this out for our clients before we like onboard them. So it's like one of those things that
just not paying attention. So, Yeah, it's a really big issue. So what we came to find out like and I
was sitting on this idea for a quite some time is like we needed more of a more of a kind of like a
timeline format where we can see when certain events happen. Like we delivered the designs
on this day and you know, client approved on this day. And you know, we started the project on
this day and payment came on this day and you know, all these other things. And then
We can kind of measure start of a like the health, like the health of that relationship, so it could
be a matter of like, you know, how is this, you know, is it a good relationship is a bad
relationship. So we basically came up with this concept of like, what we call it timeline app and
you can basically within Chrome, it's going to be a little extension and when you go in there like
any website that you're on. So, let's say you're using I No Asana for like task management or
something. You can click on that little icon in your Chrome extension and like in the browser and
what it will do is it's going to take that URL. And it's going to also take the icon of that app. So
Asana and this case and it's basically going to pull it into this timeline format and you can have
multiple projects like so each, you can have multiple timelines for individual projects, so let's say
we call this, you know.
And I want to add. Delivered or deployed this, you know, new feature on this day and that gives
us, you know, kind of like a milestone that we hit. And so, what basically happens is that we can
keep track of the most important events across all different systems and then so when we go
back or let's say, we onboard somebody new on to the team or or the client, you know, maybe
says something that maybe is not like valid or says, like what you guys look at this on this day.
And we need it on this day. Can simply go back and kind of make sure and check like when it
was actually delivered. So we don't have to go scramble through our tickets or emails through
our task management tool it just like allows us to have a central place to put all of those things
into. So when we go back and we go into the project within that timeline and say oh this was for
client. A let's check old all of the events for client a and we can see that you know, we did all of
these things for them. And these are the dates that we deliver them. And we can see exactly
where those things are because they link back to the original task or the original ticket. So the
whole point of it is to keep track of the important stuff and be able to reference back to the
original whatever system you're on my, you can be absolutely anything, it can even be linked in
or whatever it is. You can go back and reference that original like comment or the original
conversation. So it's just like, consolidating all of the all of the noise in. Like one format and we
do it in like a timeline format where it's like, literally gives you a time stamp at the day and and
kind of any relevant information to that to that task ice. That sounds also like a good way to
protect yourself in case someone accused you and your company of not doing something, when
you could easily reference, it without having to go through a bunch of different tools to. Exactly.
Exactly. And then having the A client I have to do that we'll check your slack. You know one day
you know on January 25th we talked about this for some time is screenshot or right. Exactly.
And so it allows us to pretty much like hold ourselves accountable and make sure that the client
you know is not trying to pull some wool, some stuff on us. Nice. Yeah, it sounds I can be good
for diagnosing potential.
I communication things like if there's a reason why, you know, someone just is not
understanding that you're not remembering that they have to fill out a ticket, like figuring out
where that Gap could be, and how you could rectify it or how do you guys go? And kind of make
that easier on yourself. You could see where that Gap. Might be exactly. Exactly. And then
sometimes people will lose the context of the original scope of work and you know, all these
other things and it's like, okay well we told you this on this day and here Document so and you
signed off on it. So in that sense there shouldn't be any any issues. Heist. Yeah. I have So what
I'm going to be using table, saw do one of the one of the cool things about tips, Otto is that it
has a built-in dashboard for each of your clients so that that's probably a good thing that I
should incorporate into that. Like, find some way to include all the context. Yeah, no. No. Just
the contracts and everything, but yourself, exactly. Yeah. And it's good because with like, within
our system, and I'll go when we're ready to kind of push it out to the public. I'll
Send you over, you know, something that you can, you know, test it out and have like a version
for yourself and see what you think about it. Because we're going to be definitely rolling this out
as a product, under our agency, something that will be like, selling down the road to, but we
definitely want to get some people within like, you know, service businesses and things like that.
Like, you can also be used for, you know, software companies and like we released our, you
know, fourth version of our app. Like, and like, hit those milestones and You know, we had this
many problems within this version and you know, all this other stuff so it can be used for
anything. It can be used for people exercising and they want to lose weight or they want to, you
know, do something for themselves and say, Hey, you know, it took me 10 months to lose 5
pounds but you know, I started doing, you know, these things and now I'm losing weight. Like I
can keep track of it on a different level and I can lose weight like every two months or something
like that, so it can be used for so many different variations.
Is, but we're mainly focusing at the moment on just like service. Businesses and agencies, like,
use this because we just see like a huge gap and Communications and everyone's running so
many different systems and all this other stuff. Nice. Yeah. That's um, yeah, I'm absolutely
happy to at the very least tested. Yeah, I'm big on anything that that encourages people to again
check the health, that's a great metaphoric sense. That it sounds like it's kind of a doctor in a
way Hey, it's diagnosing things and finding solutions for them. Oh yeah, that, yeah, exactly. And
I think, I think also like, you know, long-term like when you're hiring new people, and maybe
you've been with a client like a client's been with you for a long time. You know, at the end of the
day, it's like, you can definitely get that person to like look into it and be like, oh, you actually,
you know, you actually can see, like, the full relationship over the client and you can see how
How to, you know, deal with them and you know, all that other stuff. So it's just sometimes really
becomes like a really good tool to kind of get people on board at as well. So they don't have to
go scramble through all the tickets and you know all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of a lot of
Freelancers and other people I find especially newer ones, they talk about having all these like
16-hour days or whatever. I remember freelancer. I knew you know we talked about how long
our days were and how busy she was and it took her years just to make six figures. It's like, and then it's just, I know.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing, like I don't make six figures at all. Yeah. But my point is like,
you know, if you're not earning money on the extra time, you're spending then, why are you
doing that? There's ways of optimizing it, and why are you spending so much time
and not getting paid for it?
Zlato: Right. Exactly. That's right. Yeah, it's crazy. It's, there's a lot of different things that people can do to optimize everything that they're doing. So anything you like to share before before we leave? Um no not so much. I
Zlato: Right. Exactly. That's right. Yeah, it's crazy. It's, there's a lot of different things that people can do to optimize everything that they're doing. So anything you like to share before before we leave? Um no not so much. I
would just probably tell people to, you know just do everything you can to be as efficient as you can especially if you're a freelancer and or running an agency in that case or any kind of business you're running just make your life easy and be efficient don't waste too much time on the things that are that don't require you to do, you know, if there's a template for something in the you keep doing the same thing over. And over again, build something around it to automate
that as much as possible, even if you did 80% of Automation and twenty percent annual work, it's going to save a lot of time. So do I tell people to to, you know, hit the ground running, really.
Ashley: Nice. Yeah, I actually wrote a Medium post a couple of weeks ago about that, that, you know, sometimes there's not necessarily an automation for what you need to do. There's it's, you know, making it efficient isn't necessarily built into it but there's always some sort of workaround you can do to make it at least somewhat more efficient. And if it's not 100% more efficient, at least it's something. At least your capacity and your income are a little more aligned.
Zlatko: Yeah. exactly.
Ashley: Thanks so much for coming, Zlatko.
Ashley: Thanks so much for coming, Zlatko.
Zlatko: Thank you for having me. Let me know if you need anything else. Now that we've been connected for a while, I'm always happy to help with anything I can. Good luck with your podcast and everything that you're doing.
Ashley: I'm sure I'll see you on LinkedIn and I'm excited to see your new tool! Does it have a name?
Zlatko: It's actually called Thymeline app. We're in the process of doing internal testing right now, really coming up with some of the marketing side of things on how to best describe this because there's so many different ways -- focusing on one side of things is going to be pretty challenging from that perspective so we're looking doing at doing a lot of creatives around making quick videos and GIFs to make the process a bit easier to comprehend.
Ashley: I'm sure I'll see you on LinkedIn and I'm excited to see your new tool! Does it have a name?
Zlatko: It's actually called Thymeline app. We're in the process of doing internal testing right now, really coming up with some of the marketing side of things on how to best describe this because there's so many different ways -- focusing on one side of things is going to be pretty challenging from that perspective so we're looking doing at doing a lot of creatives around making quick videos and GIFs to make the process a bit easier to comprehend.
Ashley: Yeah and I think if you're especially new in any of these kinds of fields, freelancer or what have you, unless you've encountered a lot of these problems and headaches, you don't necessarily know how important it is to rectify them.
Zlatko: Right. Exactly.
Ashley: It's good to hear you're going to look at streamlining the messaging around that. Cool.
Zlatko: We have to. For sure. Thanks so much for having me and I'll definitely send you an invite and you can give me your honest opinion and we can go from there.
Ashley: Cool. Awesome. Well you have a great day and we'll talk soon. Thanks again.
Thanks so much for joining me, Zlatko. I had a blast chatting with you. Again, visit me at ashleyashbee.com/learn to sign up for my course and book as well and you can be on the same list for all that stuff. Thanks for listening and have a great day.