How to Get Organized in Your Business Once and For All with Dana La Riel Morales

How to Get Organized in Your Business Once and For All with Dana La Riel Morales

Welcome to this episode of The Determined Mom Show. Today. I have a professional organizer in business and home in pretty much every area of your life. She can help you and it is the lovely Dana La Riel Morales.

What is the thing that you feel people struggle with the most?

What I find people struggle with the most is, first of all, just the overall process of how do I do X, Y, Z, and, for most of us, we’ve gone into business and we’ve had, the right way to do something is in our minds at the time.

But as our business has continued to progress or as we’ve been able to continue to grow, things have come into the business that maybe we never anticipated or happenstance they started happening and we didn’t plan for it.

We just kind of went with the flow and just kind of made it up as we went along. And so there are, there’s a lack of true process development specifically with small business owners. And it doesn’t matter if you’re full-time or part-time in your business. I find that this happens with entrepreneurs and business owners across the board, even big business has this problem. 

For those of you who started your business and had processed at the beginning of your business, your business has evolved, but your processes haven’t. And so a lot of times you’re, you are conducting business with old processes and the old ways of doing things, and so you are wasting time where it can be streamlined and you can be more efficient in your business.

That’s probably the number one thing I see. And the other is just time management, just where do I find the time to do all the things? Most important is picking. And I find that happens with everybody. So you’re not alone, in that world. 

One of the techniques that I like to teach is, first of all, finding your peak time. When is the time when you peak in your workday? And everybody’s is gonna be different. Some have more than one. Like two different peak times. 

My peak times are 10 to 12 and then two to four for my, day-to-day job. I am a side hustler, so I have a full-time job, during the day, and then I work in my business in the evenings around family.

When you think about your peak time of working, that is when you are at your optimal. Your brain is the sharpest, you’re able to crank things out a little faster. So some people are just mourning people and they tend to get their stuff done and are most efficient in the morning. Focusing on picking your top three things you have to address for the day. Picking those top three things and breaking them down.

For those who have never done it, there is a small learning curve, but the task that it takes to do it is so nominal and it drives me nuts when I see people paying thousands of dollars for a basic out-of-the-box website. 

That’s something that we break down very easily. I am in the process of scaling up my business. My goal is to start hiring people that are gonna do, the kind of teamwork. I already have a couple of people that I have on staff that does that.

But I wanna hire more people so then that way I can just do speaking engagements and just spreading awareness and all of the operations go smoothly, hopefully without me being the one doing everything. What advice do you have for me?

The very first thing that I would recommend that you do is to make sure that every single one of your processes is documented. Because a lot of times, specifically when you’re going from Solopreneur to a business that has employees or contractors. We don’t realize how much of that information is in our heads.

Like you just have to do this, and this, you’re explaining that to somebody, you’re missing like three steps because you forgot. You miss the steps and you miss caveats, especially if they’re client-facing, where you have your list of clients you have had, and there are specific nuances that maybe one client you do for this client, and maybe that’s just special for them because of a specific scenario.

Basic information, but details about that client so that if you are not the person making that touchpoint, somebody else coming in can have a little bit of knowledge and understanding about that person or that relationship. 

Make sure that you truly understand that individual, regardless if it’s me touching them or somebody else. Process thing, I think is the biggest piece of writing down all your information. But after you’ve gone through that moment of making sure things are documented, and I guarantee as you begin doing that, you’re going to see a couple of things. 

Number one, you’re going to see some of your processes may be bloated. That’s what most of my clients find, it’s like they start writing it down. Be prepared to do some streamlining, and some, evaluation of not only your process or your systems but the tools that you’re using as well. 

Because there are tools,  that are tools that are more geared toward a solopreneur or for small business. And when you start adding people on, you either need to reevaluate the license structure of whatever you’re using, or it just may not be appropriate anymore for the growth of your business. 

And so that requires you to level up or switch systems. It’s not always required depending on what you’ve chosen, but just understanding what that increase in your business means from a system standpoint is gonna be important too.

Then a project management tool. I think Asana and Trello are great for a basic, pretty much solopreneur situation. Even if you have two or three people, I think it is helpful, but it can get bloated quickly and I think it requires you to see things differently. That you don’t necessarily need to do. 

So a tool that I use in my business is Freed Camp. This is just a great tool. I’m a very visual person, so I like to at times see things in the can bond board, which is where you have the cards and all of that, whereas, The project manager side of me, when I’m going tasked by the task to have the task list where it is going down and you have the separate, the separate lists in there.

There are certain things that I want to capture. So your bio, your picture. different information about your business, like your social media information, like all this info that’s gonna help me create your show note, create the actual recording, ask questions during the call, get your social media stuff together.

I’ve created a template on my screen that allows me to capture that information because, by default, that’s not in that task form. I’m turning it into a blog post, then I have a different one because there are only certain things that I need.

So it puts the subtask and then all of the extra-filled questions that I can just have in one place and not have to go from place to place to place. The reason why I love using Freed Camp specifically for my podcast is that after I’ve had season one, all the people from periodically throughout the year I’ll like do a push to push that back out into social media. 

I originally started it in the podcast section. Once that podcast has aired and I’m pretty much quote-unquote done with that particular situation, I can set it regularly under what I call my content library, and so it pops up and says, Hey, you can post this again.

So learning your tools and being able to adapt them to your particular scenarios is gonna be key for you, I think. I think I have a little I call it the squirrel mentality because especially if you’re in a bunch of Facebook groups and everybody’s like, well what do you, I’m looking for this. What do you use for this? And then everybody throws in there, you know, their information into the hat, and you’re like, Ooh, let me go check that out.

The truth is, is that that can get overwhelming quickly, and. It causes hybrid systems. So you’re trying out an app and let’s say that you’re kind of interested in it and you. kind of fiddling around with that. Well, now you’ve got data in multiple places. And so you’ve started here testing this out, but what happened to the stuff that you had over here?

Did you ever bring it over into this new world and how often are you doing that? So you’re creating work for yourself unnecessarily. So what I like to do is whenever I have applications that are kind of exciting. So project management was a perfect example because I wasn’t a hundred percent happy with Asana at the time. 

I had my full list of requirements that I kind of came up with. And so whenever I found or heard about, you know, um, Monday, I get monday.com and all these other tools, that’s what my comparison. I had something so I could make it apples to apples. When I started doing that with all of these ex, squirrel tools, like I like to call them, I would see that, oh, it isn’t that good.

Where is the best place for people to find you? 

My business is split into kind of three, it’s really two, but I like to say three different buckets. I focus on business and personal because I’m, I’m a holistic process strategist, I work with the whole person so some people come to me for just business stuff. Some people come to me for just life stuff and then, Come to me for all of it.  And so what I found is that it was difficult because I work a lot with side-hustling entrepreneurs.

I decided to start my membership to assist and to meet people where they are. I also address the on-demand need for this information because I do the work breakdown structure type of processing that it helps them in doing, working in that, in that way. So the training, everything in an organized academy is my brain. 

That’s how you can work with me. The best way to reach me is to go to dl morales.com. I’m changing my website over, and it’s supposed to launch within the next couple of days of the new site. But either way, just go to dl morales.com. You’ll be able to see any resources, any events, or anything that’s going on in the podcast. 

Then as well as social media. I’m on Instagram and I’m also on Facebook as well, and LinkedIn. Thank you so much for being here. We completely appreciate it and I’m sure that all of the listeners are appreciating it as well.