Andrea Nordling 00:00
My friend, it is a great day to be recording for you. I always start these episodes by saying I’m
so excited to talk about what I’m going to talk about. And while that is true, I have to say today
I’m just excited about the day. It is a Friday when I am recording this for you. And it is snowing
outside at my house. And I have just killed it this week, I have to say I have that deep feeling of
satisfaction like oh, I just got so much done, some tackled some really big projects that have
been looming, and made a lot of progress and feeling so satisfied. I have a fridge and freezer
stocked with all of the best groceries from yesterday’s Costco run so. So I have snowstorm is
coming in, I have all of the good foods in my house. And it’s Friday. And I’m really excited about
what I’m talking and sharing to you about today. So that’s all of the things together are just
combined to make this pretty much a perfect storm, literally, of me wanting to just get in the
weeds with you on all of the things technology, and software’s and tools. And how do you know
what to use when there’s so many options in your business I have been there, I have helped
many people go through this journey, I have made a lot of changes. Recently, I’m going to talk
to you all about all of these things today. All technology, I’m going to try to help you by
explaining the current TPN. When I say TPN, it’s the profitable, nutritious, the current TPN tech
stack along with when and why some of these have changed over the last five years. When the
business was started. Everything I’m going to go through today is listed out and linked up in the
show notes page. For this episode, I am going to give a lot of resources, they are all linked, I
don’t expect you to remember all of them. Don’t worry, we’ve got you, you go to the profitable
nutritionist.com/ 121, which is the episode number of this podcast episode one to one. And
you’re gonna get a full breakdown with all of the links, including the Getting Started
suggestions, and the growing and scaling suggestions. I have different suggestions for different
stages of business and different needs that you may or may not have. So all of it is linked up
there. For now. For now, just listen, just sit back and listen to a tale. I’m going to explain before
I get into all of the things that we’ve learned all of the changes that have been made and what
my suggestions are in various areas technology wise for online business, I want to let you know
how I have this all categorized? Because when I sat down to outline this episode, I had to figure
out how did I want to like kind of list out this information, how did I want it to make sense. And I
realized the way that I have it categorized and the way it makes sense in my brain will probably
be really helpful for you as well, which is by business department. What in the world, probably
not the direction that you thought I was going to go. But this is how most things in my business
A
are categorized and probably will be helpful for you to think through for yours as well, which is
three different categories, marketing and sales. Category number one, operations, which is
anything administrative. And fulfillment is the third category, which is all things delivering
offers to clients client related everything client facing is fulfillment. So marketing and sales is
one department operations and administration and then fulfillment. So all hires, I mean,
honestly, pretty much everything in my business is categorized into these three things. All
software’s that we use are related to one of those, sometimes they’re, they bridge the gap
between a couple of them, but it’s a good way to to separate and categorize what we’re
working with activities in the business KPIs, which are key performance indicators, those are
metrics that we’re tracking to make sure that we are departmentally on track for goals and that
each person on the team is meeting their goals and is on track for what they need to be doing.
But all of it basically in my business is categorized in these three categories. So I thought, hey,
as we’re going through the tech, I’ll just keep things really, really systematized for you as well.
And I thought it would be good to explain that everything falls into one of those three
categories, every hire every everything. Alright, so back to the issue at hand, which is software
and tools, and all of that good stuff, specifically what we are currently using in each of these
departments and what we have used in the past with recommendations on when and if you
should upgrade and what that looks like I’m going to do my best to just let you know what we
have done well and what I would do differently if I could. So you’re going to quickly see that
from 2019 to mid 2023. In my business we used Kajabi only with a few additions of other
softwares but primarily it was Kajabi only and I am a huge Kajabi promotor in like since starting
with Kajabi, in 20, early 2019, I used it so much recommended it so much that I became a
Kajabi partner, I have collaborated with the Kajabi teams, various teams on various projects
within the software helping to make it better. I’ve given feedback on lots of stuff. I’ve done beta
projects with them. We’ve done webinars together, I am intimately familiar with the software.
And because of that, I have been huge promoter of it. I’ve helped so many people get their
businesses going on this software and on this platform. And the reason I love it is because it is
an all in one business platform, including your website, your email list collection, and sending of
emails, your funnels, your membership sites, courses, payment processing, including like after
pay, and Google Pay, and all of the payments, all of the things and more all in one spot. So the
reason that I love this, I have loved it for my business for this reason. But I also love to
recommend it for this reason is because you learn how to use one software. And then you can
pretty much do everything in your online business and all of the tech and the tools and all of
the different components just work, they talk to each other. They just, it just works, things
aren’t breaking. And the telephone cords aren’t like failing to communicate, or whatever the
internet version of that is, which I had had previously, in my business before 2019. When I
moved everything to Kajabi, I had had that experience so much where I had my website, I one
platform, and I had my emails on a different platform, and I did webinars on a nother different
platform, and I had courses on a different platform, everything was different. And it turned out
that a lot of times things weren’t talking to each other and integrating the way that I thought
that they were or the way that they should have been. And it was very costly, both in time and
in lost revenue, when I would figure out that something hadn’t been working for months, and I
didn’t realize it. So anyway, I love that the Kajabi all in one system just works. Okay. And for
that reason, I think it is so valuable. It also is a platform that most business owners will be able
to grow into meaning you’re not going to have to be constantly upgrading software’s and
migrating and changing. So I love Kajabi for all of the different reasons. And if you ever want to
try it for your business, head over to the profitable nutritionist.com/kajabi que AJ abi, and on
that page, you will find all of my partner bonuses, I have lots of support for my Kajabi referrals,
including live zoom office hours, some free courses, some other like Kajabi hacks and some
videos that I’ve recorded to help get you started with Kajabi. And I have a partner link on that
page with an extended Free Trial through my partner like so. If ever you want to give it a try,
head to that page, the profitable nutritions.com/kajabi. And you’ll find all of all of the things
including a link to start that extended free trial. It’s a 30 day free trial on that page. Okay, so
I’m going to be telling you all about Kajabi. I’m going to be telling you about like when we have
moved certain components off of there, and what we’ve used, but I wanted to just give that
kind of background on what Kajabi is and why I am such a believer, and I think it has saved me
so much time and has made me so much money, like lots and lots and lots of money. And then
I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of my referrals that have had a similar experience. So all of
the good things about Kajabi. But we have made a few changes this year. And a few additions.
So I’m going to talk about that. For context though, from 2019 to mid 2023, most of my
business was run through Kajabi with just a few additional tools that I’m going to talk about for
each of the three departments marketing and sales and operations and fulfillment. Then in
2023, we did some very big tech switches, some of them that worked out as planned, and
others that did not work out as planned. So I’m going to walk you through that whole thought
process and that whole experience and what we have landed on for now as I’m recording this, it
is early 2024. And we have no intention of switching anything up anytime soon. So I’m gonna
bring you through what the current tech stack is for now. Okay, all that to say we’re gonna start
with marketing and sales. That’s where we’re gonna go I was gonna sidebar for a second I’m
not gonna sidebar I’m going to focus. I’m going to focus on marketing and sales. Let’s talk
about it first component of our tech stack and probably your tech stack for marketing and sales
is your website. We now have a WordPress website, the profitable nutritionist.com is on
WordPress. Now, I know I told you that everything was on Kajabi and it was but here is
something you may not be aware of it was kind of behind the scenes and if you’re not paying
too close attention and I wouldn’t expect that you are you may not realize that this happened.
But in 2019 When I started my business coaching side of my business which has now become
the profitable nutritionist it wasn’t called the profitable nutritionist it was called Build a
Profitable practice. So the website build a profitable practice.com is the original website that I
was and still is housed on Kajabi. So that whole website, all the assets for that website,
including a blog, and where we publish show notes for the podcast for the first two years, and
all all courses, student logins, all emails, everything is sent from the builder profitable
practice.com website on Kajabi. I built that myself, I have a resource for how to do that. It’s
called the website in a weekend bonus course on exactly how to do that. It was a lean and
mean website that I made almost $2 million on on Kajabi. So it was great. But then, as the
business evolved, and as it does, the branding changed, and the profitable nutritionist was born
somewhere along the way, I believe that this was sometime in 2021, where the original version
of the program which is now the profitable nutritionist turned into the profitable nutritionist, we
applied for a trademark for that name, the podcast, the profitable nutritionist was born. And the
brand just kind of morphed into everything being the profitable nutritionist, but it was still on
the build a profitable practice.com website. And really, that wasn’t a problem, it worked out just
fine. But when we looked at making some changes, tech wise in 2023, I decided that was a
good time to split up the websites keep the Build a Profitable practice.com site, we still use a
lot of assets on there, there’s still plenty of articles and videos and things that get good organic
traffic from search engines onto that site. So there was no reason to completely eliminate it.
But I wanted to build out a separate website for the profitable nutritionist.com which was now
very firmly my brand. Okay, so it was just like, let’s just split the two things and make a clean
break clean delineation more like a clean delineation between those two brands. Okay. So
that’s what happened in mid 2023. I, how do I explain this decision? Be? I love the fact that on
Kajabi on the Kajabi website, I could just whip up a page in two seconds, it was super simple. I
had done it a million times everything was hooked together and just worked. And it was easy.
And I could do it myself. And it was no problem. I was very resistant to having a WordPress
website because I don’t know WordPress, or WordPress has quite a steep learning curve. I don’t
know how to do it, I have no interest in learning how to do it. And so it was going to be and I
knew that this decision was going to involve having my team and probably some new people
have to come onto the team that were WordPress savvy to be able to do that instead of me
being able to last minute Lucy whip up a web page if I needed to, I was going to be having to
plan further in advance. And we were going to have to really plan this out because I don’t know
WordPress. I don’t want to know WordPress. So that has been a if I’m just going to be candid,
that is a thing right now is that the learning curve is steep. But the so that’s in the cons column
of WordPress, in the pros column is WordPress is very customizable. And the reason that I did
decide to build the new website on WordPress is because we have a lot of functionality on the
new website for how to categorize and link podcast episodes of which now this is episode 121.
So we have a lot of podcast episodes. I have articles, blog, blog posts, we call them articles,
there’s a lot of content that needs to be readily linked and found. And there’s just a lot more
customizations that we can do on a WordPress website to do that, than what we could do on
the Kajabi site. And I want to be clear The Kajabi site was working fine, I just know how much
better it can be and how much more customized the experience can be for, for delivering a lot
of content. And so that is what I am optimizing for now my goals are different in the beginning
of my business, it was all about sales, proving my process, figuring out my messaging, getting
the business off the ground. And now at seven figures and more a year, it’s my focus is just a
little bit different. The goal is a little bit different now they I have a wealth of content and a
huge treasure trove of stuff that I need to make sure people can find. And so we’re optimizing
for a little bit different experience now. And I would just say that that decision, I just want to be
clear about why that decision was made because I do think that a drag and drop builder with
really easy to use templates is the move for most people listening to this episode. Unless you
already know how to make a WordPress website. I would not recommend that endeavor
because the learning curve is really steep and your time is so much better spent in talking to
people about your offer. Making offers talking to your clients, delivering your process to your
clients, making your process better for your clients. All of those things are such a better use of
your time rather than figuring out how to be a WordPress website developer. So drag and drop
builder with templates, I think is the way to go. So be that Got something on Kajabi or I’ve also
used Squarespace in the past my first nutrition website was on Squarespace from 2015 to
2018, that was very easy to use. I think both of those are great options. Okay, so right now our
tech stack for website is the WordPress website, the profitable nutritionist.com, we still have
the Build a Profitable practice.com on Kajabi. That is, like I said, still has pages that are
organically bringing in enough traffic that it makes sense to keep it there. But a lot of the pages
on that website are redirecting to the profitable nutritionist.com. So those two websites are
kind of working in conjunction, I also have another personal website, Andrea nordling.com,
which right now is just a landing page at this point with a button that goes to the profitable
nutritionist.com. But in the future, when I will need to have this there will come a time when I
want to have my branded content outside of TPN, like booking speaking engagements,
personal things like that, that is not a priority for now to build out at all. But in the five year
plan, I will want to have that asset, which is me and my website separate from the profitable
nutritionist brand. So those three websites just kind of giving you an idea of the thought
process behind the three how they link together. And of course, the tech involved behind them.
The Andrea nordling.com website is just a WordPress landing page right now. But that will be a
full website later, pre 2023 It was just the Build a Profitable practice.com website on Kajabi,
which worked fabulously made well over a million dollars with that one software. And that was
all of the marketing. Okay, so the website, the calls to action, people entering their email
addresses getting emails from me, which is all of the marketing and selling that I did was via
email, all of that podcast episodes, recordings, blog posts, all of the things was all on that
website for a really long time. And it works great. You can tweak and you can migrate your
software when you have a team and you know exactly what bells and whistles that you need
based on data, not on a whim, which is what we did in 2023. Based on data, not on a whim,
we’ve made the plan to migrate a lot of the assets off of that site and onto the new custom
WordPress site, which is I’m very excited about getting rebuilt right now. So as I’m recording
this episode, we are in the rebuild process, and the new version of our WordPress website is
going to be releasing in q1 of this year, which I’m so excited about. And I have a lot to talk
about the functionality of that, and how the content is all linking together and why we’re
making certain changes on that WordPress site. So that’s going to be another very
comprehensive upcoming episode. But for now, we’re just talking the tech stack. So website is
what you need to know all about in the marketing and sales department. Second thing in the
marketing and sales department is our email service provider, and how we deliver our email
marketing. This is my biggest marketing and sales focus, because all roads lead to Rome to my
email list for my business model. This is how I have it structured, everything that I do these
podcast episodes, everything, anywhere that you ever see me, the call to action is going to be
something that gets you onto my email list so I can email you, and will you with all of the
expertise and resources coming your way. Whether that is through my free course and the
webinars that are available free trainings, we do quarterly free trainings, that’s the only place
that you will hear from me with new content or when enrollment is open for any of my paid
offers is through email. So for me, it is very, very important that people are getting my emails
and that they’re getting well they’re first of all getting on my email us and then they get those
emails, okay? Sidenote, I suggest that you do the same if you don’t have an all roads lead to
Rome type strategy, and you’re posting here, and you’re posting there. And it’s like a little bit
all over the place. But there’s no catch all one place where people hear from you, your people
are going to miss information. And you are going to feel like you’re being repetitive because
you’re saying the same things in all of the places but actually, you’re not because most people
aren’t seeing it. And then you’re going to wonder, like, how come I’m not getting results, I feel
like I’m so repetitive. And really you’re not because people are seeing like maybe once or
maybe twice instead of having an all in one like safety net, I think of it as a safety net. I think
I’m just gonna call it that like your safety net, which is where everybody’s going to hear from
you always. And then if they happen to see an ad from you, or they happen to see a social
media post from you or they happen to see a podcast episode from you or something else. In
addition, that’s a bonus, but for sure they’re going to hear from you from your email, okay, that
is an asset that you own, keep it super simple. And make sure that you have an asset that you
own, which is your website and your email list. Nobody can take those platforms away from you
as your primary focus that you’re directing all your traffic to Okay, so our email service provider
for pre 2023 was just the built in email sending from Kajabi which was perfect. worked really
well. In mid 2023. We switch to a different software that was an absolute disaster for email
sending called go high level, that was the disaster. So don’t don’t click that don’t go search it,
you don’t want it for emails, you don’t want it. The reason that we did this was to consolidate
into a more comprehensive CRM customer relationship management system for being able to
have a, just like a very, very built out CRM in conjunction with our email so that we could keep
track of details about our clients all in one place. Okay, so that was the goal, still is the goal. We’ve done it differently now. But that’s why we decided to go with go high level, because it is
a CRM platform. And it does have a lot of bells and whistles and a lot of automations, including
the ability to sync with your email. So that was the goal, the effect of it. And the What actually
happened was four months of tech nightmares, two dismal launches, because people couldn’t
get our emails, they weren’t getting our emails at all. Even though on our end, it appeared that
everything was working. And emails were delivering as they should have been, but they
weren’t. And the thing is, I have a very email centric business, I know my numbers, I know what
typically what the conversion rates would be and what we can expect with the emails that
we’re sending. And none of those things were happening. So I knew that there was a problem,
which I talked all about, in Episode 108, where I went into more detail on evaluating and
troubleshooting a failed launch. So you can absolutely go back and listen to that I go into a lot
more detail about the email issues that we had at this point. But let’s keep it on track, I’m not
going to go down all of the rabbit holes, I want to keep it on track for our tech stack. So after
this very, very bad situation, which was July ish, 2023 to October, end of October. Yeah. End of
October 2023. In go high level, we migrated our email list once again. And this is not for the
faint of heart, I went into a lot of detail in Episode 108, about migrating email lists and a
cautionary tale. So listen to that, you do not want to be migrating your email database, often or
ever, if at all possible. So you will lose people, you will lose a lot of people for a lot of different
reasons. So we had to do it though we were in a situation where the go high level software was
not working for our needs. I’m sure for people who don’t have a super email centric business, it
works just fine. But for our needs, it was an absolute NO. So we migrated in late 2023, to Active
Campaign for emails and for our CRM, which is amazing. No knock on wood, it seems
everything is finally working again. And we are on the other side of the tech fails. That plagued
us in q3 and q4 of 2023. But I’m not sad about it, I have to be honest with you, when I reflect on
last year, it provided so much education and so much learning and so much, just like so much
that I can teach you from that experience. I’m not mad that it happened. It’s all good. But part
of that transition was sending from a new domain. So remember, we had been sending from
Hello at Build a Profitable practice.com. For years and years and years, we had really good
authority and sending credibility from that domain where all of the emails were coming from,
and then launching the new website on profitable nutritionist.com. And moving to the new
software, we started sending from a new sending domain, which was Hello at the profitable
nutritionist.com. So we had to warm up that domain. And we had to establish credibility and a
solid sending reputation. And like I said, I talked all about this process in Episode 108. So go
listen to the details. If you’re going to ever go migrate your email, and your email list, which
hopefully you’re not going to have to do. And I highly recommend starting in an email platform
that you’re going to use for the long term for this reason. But because of that, because of
changing domains, and changing all of the things that we changed a lot of what went wrong
with go high level. And we knew what to do differently and better. When we moved into Active
Campaign in November of 2023. We fully migrated into Active Campaign and everything has
gone really, really well. We love that platform. It is very, very robust. And I don’t anticipate us
moving from Active Campaign anytime soon. If ever, it has a ton of functionality. And we can
really really grow like indefinitely in this platform. We I don’t see that will outgrow it at all. So
that is the good news with the tech stack right now as I my believe we’re going to just stay
comfy and happy in Active Campaign for a long, long, long time. But I would not caution but I
would just give anybody looking at email service providers that might be looking at Active
Campaign, I would give you the honest feedback that because it is so robust, it isn’t the most
user friendly platform to start from. Although it I mean that’s in the cons list that it would just
be a little bit harder to get started in Active Campaign and to figure out how to use it but in the
pros list, then you’re going to know how to do it and as your business grows, you’re going To be
very comfortable and familiar in a really robust email service provider that you can probably
grow with forever. So all that to say, if you want to use Active Campaign, we are having a great
experience right now. But then in true transparency, my team really is the one in there. It’s not
me at this point, doing most of the emails. Okay, so that’s our email service provider, currently
active campaign, and I think will be for a very long time. Third component of our tech stack in
marketing and sales is payment collection and checkout pages. Kajabi is where we collected
payments for years and years and years, it’s where all of our checkout pages were, I would
stick with this option indefinitely, because since we migrated out of Kajabi, for payments, they
have added Kajabi payments, which integrates after pay, and Google Pay and Apple Pay and all
the pays and PayPal and Stripe and all of it in one place. It is so easy. Again, I love the all in one
capability of Kajabi. Because everything just works, it just talks to each other, you get it set up
once and you just get paid, it just goes magically into your bank account. And it’s so simple. So
I love that. For now, we are processing payments on Thrive cart instead of Kajabi. Because we
can a B test checkout pages, which is advanced, most people listening to this will never need to
do that or like not never you will at some point want to do that. But you’re not anywhere near
the point where you need to be thinking about what payment processor can i a b test checkout
pages. So probably you don’t need to worry about that at all. But it is something that in my
business we are looking at, we want to figure out which checkout page options convert the
best. And if we have testimonials up here does that convert better than down here. And some
of that stuff is what we’re testing right now, which we can’t do in Kajabi. But we can do in
Thrive cart. So we’re using Thrive cart for processing payments. The con of this pro is that we
can AV test con is that it recently broken, we didn’t realize it but this can happen with anything
so and now they were having a software glitch. And it was only for about a day. But it
happened to be a day when we were making sales and the sales didn’t come in and people
were getting errors on the pages, which was super annoying. So that can happen with
anything. I can’t say that that’s a Thrive cart problem. That’s just as a life as an internet
business owner problem. But anyway, that’s what we’re using right now for checkout pages,
and collecting payments. With over 100 episodes of the profitable nutritionist podcast at this
point, my team asked if we could create a podcast and roadmap quick guide to the most
popular episodes, which I thought was a fabulous idea. They’re so smart. We ended up
categorizing 30 ish of the top episodes into a few different lists and categories. So you can
easily find the most useful content for exactly where you’re at in your business right now. To
get the podcast roadmap download, just go to the profitable nutritionist.com/roadmap One
word, you’re more than welcome to binge all of the episodes, of course. But if you’d like the
shortcut guide, this roadmap is going to be gold for navigating to the exact episodes that you
need right now. Again, download the PDF at the profitable nutritionist.com/roadmap. Now
landing pages, landing pages are another component of your sales and marketing and pre
2023. All of that was on Kajabi. So meaning just a registration page. Any landing page is a one
off page that’s not linked up in your main navigation of your website. It’s a one off page
basically. So any page like that is what I’m considering a landing page, we only use Kajabi, pre
2023. But with the addition of our WordPress site and me not knowing how to do WordPress
and not really wanting to know how and just wanting to have more functionality with being able
to AB test registration pages and pages in our funnels, we decided to add lead pages to our
tech stack. So previously, this was not a thing. But now it’s like, okay, this, it’s really easy to
make landing pages in LeadPages. And then we can do different variations of those pages, but
still going to one URL, and then it will randomly show different versions of the pages that we
want to be testing to people as they go to that one main URL. And then we can see how
different versions of those pages are converting. So that’s what I mean by a be testing different
pages of our funnel. So that’s what we’re currently using for funnel pages like it when I’m doing
a webinar. It’s the registration page, we have three or four different versions of that we’re
testing at any given time. And then we take the winner, and we test that against three different
ones, then we get take the winner of that. And we test that against some different variations.
So we’re constantly trying to get to the best converting pages. And with lead pages, were able
to do that. I will be honest, you would not need this until your business is more advanced. And
you’re optimizing funnels and really looking at conversion rate percentages and getting lots of
eyeballs on your stuff. Because until you have a lot of traffic and there’s statistical significance
to any of these numbers and conversion rates is not going to matter. Anyway, we’re running
ads this year. So that is a priority for us right now. Plus it just makes it easier to make whip up
those landing pages in lead pages instead of board Press to be honest. So landing pages. We
have lead pages right now, for the podcast. The software that we use is called Buzzsprout. And
that’s what I’ve used since the beginning that the podcast launched. I love Buzzsprout. That is
where all of our episodes are hosted. And then they get disseminated out to the different
platforms that people listen like Spotify and Apple podcasts and Google podcasts and all that. We also have a private member podcast in Kajabi. So in Kajabi, you can do podcasts as well.
And I have one for the private member podcast for the profitable nutritionist program. So every
single live coaching call that we do in TPN, gets the audio uploaded into the private member
podcast. And it gets sent out in the private member podcast feed for all students. That’s a
private feed that they subscribe to in Apple podcasts, or Google podcasts, because it’s set up
that way. So they can listen to that in their regular Apple podcast apps. And it just gets
constantly updated each week with the new coaching calls. So that’s private member podcast,
but it is set up in Kajabi, housed in Kajabi. So that’s all included in our Kajabi plan. I don’t pay
extra for that every month. And then we have otter OTT er, which is our transcribing of the live
coaching calls, we have transcriptions for all of those that has timestamps in them for what is
getting coached on and when and that is from otter. And then we have headliner, which creates
audio snippets to share from the podcast as well. So that’s all of this software for the podcast.
Oh, my gosh, man, as I’m reading through this list, we have a lot going on going on. Did it? Did
I mention that it’s way easier to use Kajabi and zoom, and then just maybe practice better and
call it good. Okay. So for webinars, we use Zoom webinars prior to 2023 Zoom webinars is
different than zoom meetings. So if you already have zoom for your business, and you’re
paying for meetings, that’s where you can see both see each other. So your cameras, that’s a
Zoom meeting. That’s the basic functionality of zoom, you have to pay more to have zoom
webinars. Now on Zoom webinars, your people can see you, but you cannot see them. And you
can have hundreds of people on your webinars. So for hosting webinars, I was using zoom for
all of the years up until 2023. In early 2023, we started using Demio for webinars because it
gives really good data on each person that is registering to the webinar. So each person
through Demio gets a unique link to join the webinar. So it tracks if that person actually joined
attracts if that person watches the replay. If they respond to a poll or a question inside the
webinar, it will show that in a report afterwards like that this person answered the question. So
for me, this is really useful. I asked in my webinars, I asked how much money people are
making what’s their goal for the year. And so I can see if somebody is making more than
$100,000 a year, for example, I know they will be a much better fit for the mastermind than for
the profitable nutritionists program, we make a note of that in our system, and they might get a
special email for me letting them know, hey, you know, we made an offer for TPN. But actually,
you’re probably better suited for this. And that starts a different conversation. So for the way
that I’m using webinars right now, I really like the functionality of Demio. It’s a significant
investment. So zoom webinars, to be honest. But I like that because of how we’re able to follow
up with people one on one instead of in something like zoom webinars, and in most webinar
platforms, you can see who joined. And you can see the percentage of people that answer a
poll, for example, but you cannot see which person answered what answer that makes sense.
So I like that functionality in Demio. That’s why we are using that. We also use a software called
first promoter in our sales department. And this is for actually is in our marketing department.
And it is for affiliate management. So we do have affiliates in we have several different
affiliates that promote my stuff, and especially free trainings, webinars, that kind of stuff. Pre
2023, I used Kajabi for this exclusively, which worked plenty great. It is not a super robust
affiliate tracking system in Kajabi. But it’s built in you can use it, you don’t pay extra for that.
And the thing, the thing about Kajabi and what I really love is it’s a little bit more expensive per
month, but everything’s just included. You don’t get nickeled and dimed for every extra thing
that you end up using. It’s just there. Just use it. It just works together so that the affiliate
tracking is one of those things in Kajabi that I just used. I used it the way that it was set up
internally there. It was not as robust as first promoter which we’re using now. But it was
workable to track referrals from affiliates get them paid, which is great. Now in first promoter,
we have more tracking and customizations but to be honest, we might start using the affiliate
tracking and thrive cart that we already paid for which is our checkout pages or something else
because first promoter is pretty expensive and it’s kind of clunky. The more we use it and we’ve
been using it for about six months or so. It is pretty clunky. So right now, full transparency, I’m
letting you know that this is in our tech stack. But that one in particular is up for review soon
and might not make the cut for much, much longer. All right, wrapping up marketing and sales,
we have Canva. I think most people are familiar with Canva. This is our graphic design tool that
team members on my team use Canva to make branded graphics and ads and website assets
and PDFs, and webinar presentations. And all of those things, team meeting templates,
actually, we use Canva quite a bit for that we have weekly meetings with the team. And all of
those are in Canvas slides and get updated week by week in Canva. So that is how we use that.
I think most people are familiar with Canva. There’s a free version and a paid version, we have
the paid version. And we use it for lots of different stuff internally, and then also client facing as
well. Okay. So that is marketing, and sales, our current tech stack, I was actually surprised as I
went through and made this list that there was a lot more on there than I thought I was going
to be telling you about. But there you have it. All right, in our operations department, we don’t
have as many things but have some Yeah, I have things to tell you about how we run things in
operations. First and foremost, the biggest, best, most important thing that you will invest in in
this department is your project management software. I am a Trello lover. Depending on how
long you have been in my orbit, you would have heard me talk about Trello and pre 2022, I
exclusively used the free software of Trello to organize my business, I think that it is the
simplest software to get up and running and set up with a project management system. start
organizing your systems, your processes, your workflows, your ideas, even if you’ve never done
any of that before getting it all in one place in your business and starting to get organized is
key. And so I think that Trello is the easiest way to do that I have a bonus course I teach in my
program called Take charge with Trello where I teach you how to set that up. And I love Trello
and did I mention I love Trello. But as my team has grown and as I have more people that need
to work in the project management software, and it’s not just me and my brain and my ideas
and what works best for me, we’ve had to make some changes and some upgrades. So we
upgraded in 2020 to two click up, which is a much more robust I feel like I’ve used the word
robust so many times in this episode, but we’re gonna keep doing it probably is it dead more
debt clickup is a much more robust project management software, and is really great for teams
and growing teams. So inside of clickup, there our to do list with assignees we can
communicate between departments between people, all of our SOPs are organized by
department, all of our assets are organized by department, different team members can come
and go and get access to just the parts of the business that they need. With really easy to set
up permissions that something I never would have even thought needed to be a consideration
in software. But it turns out, that’s a pretty big deal, giving people access to some things, but
not all of the things. So basically, the profitable nutritionist info hub is clickup. I operate solely
off of clickup. With my to do list every week, every day, I have a homescreen that shows me
exactly what I need to do some of the things I’ve put in there, some of the things other people
have put in there to get my attention. We have a system for that as well. And that’s what I open
up. And that’s what I work off of. So the for me, that works really well. And our whole business
basically is hubbed off of clickup. We also have slack. I hate Slack. Slack is the bane of my
existence. I don’t understand it. I don’t like it. It makes me angry. Can you tell my voice
changed when I started talking about Slack? I absolutely hate slack. But other people use it and
love it. So we work as a business right now, mostly with contractors. And many contractors, most contractors, I would say are accustomed to communicating on their projects inside of
Slack. So it’s kind of a necessary evil in our business. I don’t really use it, I have a recurring task
twice a week to go into Slack and see if anybody needs anything from me specifically. But that
takes me about five minutes because if there’s anything that somebody needs from me in
Slack, my operations department Raven in particular will pull that out and make a click up task
for me and put it in clickup which is what I actually look at and it’s not in Slack anyway. So
although that that is part of our tech stack, I will be honest, I don’t use it or like it, but other
people do. And it helps their workflow so it is part of the stack. Second of all is content
management and customer records. So for us we use a software called smartsuite. Previously
we had everything in air table air tables, like a really Pretty Google Sheet or Excel spreadsheet
is what your table is color coded much more functionable. functionable is fully functional word
I’m trying to say anything but robust. Just trying to think of other words. Anyway, air table is
where we had all of our customer records before having a dedicated CRM tool. And its were just
a lot of things that we needed to keep track of when somebody would sign up, for example, we
would enroll in the profitable nutritionist program, we had an automation through Zapier, that
would take their information, and it would populate into the student records inside of air table
with their mailing address with anything else that we needed to know. So in the future, when
we send out love notes, or we, you know, do the things that we do, we had all of their stuff in
one place. And that was all in air table, we have now migrated into software called smartsuite.
And this is the long story long that I’m telling you about, which is kind of like if air table and
Trello had a baby, it would come out smartsuite. So it is still at has the functionality of air table
and of being spreadsheet esque. But also with the usability of human it’s kind of like also like
Google Docs, like maybe Google Docs, and Trello, and airtable all got together, and then
something happened. That’s that’s called that’s what smartsuite is. So if you love Trello, and
that’s the format of that works well for your brain, and your brain is kind of organized in in
Trello way, which is it certain if you know, you know that, if that works for you. And if you need
the functionality of airtable, like spreadsheets, and organizing data and populating tables and
that kind of thing, if you if that’s what you need, you need smartsuite. And we love smartsuite.
This is where we now have our customer records going to we just don’t, we don’t need to be
redundant with air table. So we’ve just we’re not using air table anymore. It’s all in smartsuite.
And that’s where customer records are in addition to our dedicated CRM system. It’s where I
organize all of our content, publishing and repurposing all of the content. So there’s a huge
content database in smartsuite, that has all of my past podcasts, past emails, launch collateral,
website, articles, program content for the program’s client testimonials, database, all things
like that records are all organized in smartsuite. So instead of having 2 million different Google
Drive folders, which would be an absolute nightmare, it’s all in smartsuite, highly, highly, highly
recommend. And you wouldn’t need that in your business right away, that you can graduate
into. And I want to say with anything in these more advanced softwares, the goal would be for
you as the business owner not to be the person that would be putting information into them. I
love that I can open up smartsuite Right now, or click up for that matter, or our Google Drive.
And everything is organized. And it’s where it’s supposed to be. And it just works. But I didn’t
set that up somebody else in my business that loves to do that, that it’s their love language,
and it just brings them joy to do it. Is the person that set that up. Now, could I do it? Yes. But is
that the best use of my time? And my talents? No, absolutely not. So just want to say if you’re
listening to this going, Holy cow, this is a lot. It is a lot. It has been in creation for years. And it
isn’t me doing all of it. Okay, so just remember that smartsuite is great. We also have for
content management, Google Drive. Now I do hate it. If I’m being honest, I have, we could do
lots of podcast episodes about my thought about Google and big tech and all of the things I
hate it on a fundamental level, but there doesn’t seem to be a better option. So if there are, I’d
love to hear about it. But it’s just we have to keep going back to as a company, the easy things
that work that are most widely shareable across lots of businesses, I collaborate with lots of
businesses, I’m on podcasts, I have people on my podcast, there’s companies that want to
share resources with us, and everybody uses Google Drive. So we also use Google Drive for
that reason. That’s where podcast recording files, backups, videos, and files, that kind of stuff is
all housed in Google Drive. We also use Google workspace to host the profitable
nutritionist.com email addresses. So that’s kind of all in one inside of Google. So I’m putting
that in the content management and customer records column column. Also inside our
operations is calendar and scheduling. So we use Google Calendar, I have like 15, different
calendars and Google Calendar, but only a few of them are enabled on my weekly calendar. So
I can easily toggle information on and off but we have lots of different calendars as a team, and
then my team has access to my calendar as well so they can see when I’m available when I’m
not. And Calendly is the automated scheduling software that we use that is integrated with my
various different calendars and for other people on the team. That is where we do automated
scheduling for meetings and for people coming on and recording podcasts with me that kind of
stuff. So Google Calendar and Calendly for calendar scheduling, and then Zapier to automate
tasks between all of these different software’s. So I said in the beginning, and I will say it again,
it is not ideal to have so many different things that need to talk to each other. And as your
business gets bigger, there is more need for that, but it’s not preferred, because zaps, break,
integrations, automations, all of those things, quit working at some point, and then someone
has to go figure out what quit working, and why isn’t it working and what’s going on. So use
direct integrations whenever you can, or use all in one platforms that work whenever you can.
Honestly, I wish for a lot of this stuff, we could consolidate it. Lastly, but not least, inside the
automation, or inside the operations department, excuse me, we have DocuSign, which is
where we signed contracts for the mastermind participants. And for people coming to live
events, we have special contracts that they need to sign for that kind of stuff, just you know,
we do live events, did you know that when you are in the profitable nutritionist program, you
have access to private invitation, retreats and things that I don’t actually talk about, I’m just
saying, if you’re not in TPN, you have to be in TPS. And then you can come in and experience
Docusign. And do all of your waivers of liability and all of the things inside for in preparation of
a live event. We would love to have you. I’m kidding. I’m serious. Can you believe we’re finally
at the third department, which is fulfillment, our fulfillment tech stack is a lot leaner. Here’s
what we use, we use Kajabi. Still for our student portals for the profitable nutritionist and for
the mastermind, there are portals, they’re like, dashboards, what do you call them, I call them
portals, I think I’m gonna keep calling them portals, which is the hub of information for both of
those programs. And that’s where videos are, that’s where our bonus courses are. That’s where
all of the links are to all the important things. And they are in Kajabi. So our students in the
profitable nutritionist and in the mastermind, log into their portals on our Kajabi site and they’re
taken to their student Kajabi site, I have no intention of taking anything. Of course related
program related off of Kajabi, it works really well. And that’s also where the private member
podcast is still for fulfillment. I feel like that’s I when I was talking about podcasts, I wanted to
put it in there and let you know where that is. But really that is in the fulfillment department
because it is for our students, mighty networks is the other software that we use for fulfilling to
students. And that is where we have our private student community called the lounge. So we
do have private groups, but it’s not in a Facebook group. It’s on this software called Mighty
networks. It’s also where our live events for both programs for the profitable nutritionist and for
the mastermind, are posted so that everybody knows in those programs, you have to go into
mighty networks into the lounge and get the upcoming call schedule. The events are all posted
in there. So you can get the links to join those zoom calls and RSVP to those that’s all
happening in mighty networks, along with the community people sharing referrals, asking for
written coaching. That’s where I am in their coaching. My support staff is in their coaching. Like
I said people sharing referrals, asking for copy reviews, all of the things happening in the
lounge are happening in mighty networks. Kajabi has a community product as well, that’s
included when you have a Kajabi account, you can have a community that you can set up as
well. But it was not really that functional. It was very, very bare bones in 2020, when I was
setting up the lounge, so I opted not to go with the Kajabi community. And I set mine up on
mighty networks, which has been going for years and years at this point. And I’m not going to
migrate off of mighty networks. Because we have years and years of coaching and database of
topics to talk about and all the things on there. If I was going to do it all over again. Now I
probably would use the native community and Kajabi To be honest, because it’s in one program
hub for students, it links to everything, they’re continually upgrading the community
experience there, and really leaning into it. And I think even over the future months and years,
it’s going to become, dare I say more robust and even more integrated with the courses and
the coaching programs inside Kajabi. Actually, I know this to be true because I have talked with
several Kajabi teams about this. So if I were to do it again, I probably would start in Kajabi with
the community there. But because I already have a well established one of mighty networks. We’re just going to keep it there. All right, zoom, we use for all coaching calls inside of the both
programs. I have a Zoom account, and we also have a team account. So we can be doing
coaching calls at various times. That’s something that as we grew and realized, oh, sometimes
I’m not coaching. During the coaching call. One of our support coaches is coaching but I have a
meeting during that time. We had to have two accounts and we probably will have to add even
more accounts as we move into the future. But Zoom is what we use for those and then
practice better I’m putting here in fulfillment I do not use practice better for my business
because I’m not working with nutrition clients anymore, but so many of my clients do. So it’s
worth noting here for you. And I’m going to put this in fulfillment in the tech stack, even though
it’s not in my tech stack, practice better is going to streamline and automate your client
delivery process for your one on one clients. And groups, including what my clients use it for a
lot, is following up with protocols, session notes, consults, scheduling, so you would not need to
use a lot of the external software’s that we are using for scheduling I think a lot of that is built
in. Actually, I know a lot of it is built into practice better. Also, supplement recommendations,
follow up automations around delivering to your clients basically is really, really well dialed in,
in practice better. So in the profitable nutritionist program this year, we are actually bringing in
support directly from practice better into the program to help support our students in so many
people use practice better in maximizing the use of the software, making sure that they are
using all the bells and whistles and getting everything up and running and automating as much
of the recurring tasks, especially in client fulfillment that they can. So I even though I am not
technically using it, I’m going to include it here in fulfillment. And then last, lastly, why because
I have two, two more and fulfillment. Two more software’s we use disk.com I’ve talked about
before on the podcast, this is a company that is where we fulfill workbook orders. So we have a
very meaty workbook that goes along with the profitable nutritionist program that we send out
all over the world to clients, they can purchase it, sometimes we send it as a bonus during a
launch for free, doesn’t matter. It’s not actually me in my basement packing up the workbook.
It used to be I’m not gonna lie it used to be, but it’s not anymore. So we have this company
called disk that we order a bunch of workbooks all at once they sit on a shelf at disk, and we
pay for that shelf space, of course, but then they do all of the packing and sending for our
orders as they come in. So that is integrated with our payment software. When somebody
orders a workbook, it is integrated with disk with their software, and it just magically goes to
them, they send it out. So I would mention that this is something probably further along in
business as we do have to pay a pretty hefty fee for them to hold stock for us. And you know,
it’s not, it’s definitely not free. That’s for sure. Before using Disk, we use a company called Docu
copies to fulfill workbook orders. And I think that that’s kind of the pre pre version of disk. What
we did like about Docu copies is it we didn’t have to buy a stock in advance it was print on
demand. So we could do a launch and have 20 workbooks that we needed, for example, and
upload a CSV file to Docu copies with the those 20 names and emails are of names and
addresses physical addresses, rather, and they would send them all out at once. But they
would print them and then send them out we didn’t have to pay for the stocking and sitting on
a shelf. What doesn’t work well about Docu copies is if you’re doing one at a time. So for us as
like one off orders come in, it’s just much better to have that coming from disk. So there you
have it, that was a lot. The current software’s and tools that we are using to power the seven
figure TPM business right now in each of our three key departments, marketing and sales,
operations, administration, and fulfillment, including how this all went awry last year and what
we learned along the way, I know I just gave you a ton of information, I gave you a lot of
different companies a lot of different links, a lot of different resources that was by design,
because the end of the day, I want you to go to the show notes page, the profitable
nutritionist.com/ 121, which is the number of this episode. And there is where you are going to
get the full list of our current tech stack, you’ll be able to click through and kind of make heads
or tails of everything I just told you to get started with any of the tools that are mentioned,
especially Kajabi, which, if you’re listening to this in real time, is currently offering the best deal
of the year to get started. Okay, if you’re listening to this in the future, well, first of all, let me
say best deal of the year to get started with Kajabi is $99. For three months, it is the best deal
that you are going to get. And the link for that is on the show notes page through my partner
like and then when you sign up through my partner link, you get access to our office hours and
my bonuses and all of that good stuff. If you’re listening to this in the future, after the three
months for $99 promo is over, which is over on January 25, then you can always get the
extended free trial offer that I talked about, or you still get all of my bonuses, all of the good
things but you need to just click through the link on my Kajabi partner page, which is the
profitable nutritionists.com/kajabi You’ll always have the link on that page. And that gets you
an extra long free trial to start and get familiar with the software. I will continue to update all of
those pages periodically as our tech stack changes. So if you’re listening to this way in the
future, still go check out those resources they will redirect to a page with our current tech
stack. This is something on my list. In click up in our project management system to be
revisiting on in a quarterly basis and changing with anything that we change along the way, as
well as why. So there you have it, it’s always going to be up to date with our current tools and
resources. I’m really transparent about what we’re using, why we’re using it. And I’m happy to
give recommendations to you as you need it based on where your business is at and what your
offer is like, and what are the key things that you feel like you need. That’s also a topic of
conversation inside the lounge in the TPN program quite a bit. Because people do need
different things at different stages of their business and with different client delivery models as
well. So there’s nuances to all of this, but hopefully it was helpful for you to hear what we are
currently using, why we’re using it and help to make some decisions for you as well. Have a
wonderful wonderful week my friend
