Hey all, you're listening to the designer within podcast, episode number 37.
I'm John McClain and welcome to the designer within podcast, the business minded podcast created for creative entrepreneurs by a creative entrepreneur. That's me. I know firsthand the challenges, but also the victories that can come with our careers. And I'm here to sip and spill the tea with you. It's time to dive deep within yourself and redesign your own business and your life from the inside out.
Together we will uncover secrets and share valuable insights. So prepare for a transformative experience, my friend, because it's time to unleash the designer within.
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the designer within I am your host, John McClain. So happy to have you here. how are you doing it is March. Can you believe it? It is March, 2024. And I am just coming down from a high from K is where you at cave is the kitchen and bath show in Las Vegas.
It was a fun, fun time.
And Wowza were those booths amazing or why just inspiration after inspiration. And I love the new products.
Love seeing all of our reps there. I had the best time speaking engagements, presentations, Seeing old friends, meeting new friends, giving lots of hugs. Having lots of fun, having lots of cocktails, just really, really laughing and having a great time with everybody. So thank you for everybody who came up and said hi and told me how much they enjoyed the podcast and how much you were getting out of the podcast.
It really, really, truly means a lot to me To give me the feedback to know that you are enjoying what we are doing here at the designer within. It really is great to know that we are making a difference in your lives and in your business. And I am thankful for you for listening,
and if you do want to feel free to go over and leave a review for us on whatever platform you listen to this podcast on it's super duper easy, and we would super-duper appreciate it.
Okay. So jumping into today's episode, I am excited about today's episode. Because it is about a topic that I love and that I use every day in my business. And honestly, I use every time we record this podcast and that is technology. And before you get disgruntled or upset or Po'ed at me and turn this podcast off, hang in there.
I can tell you, I'm not going to overwhelm you with a lot of jargon and I'm not going to go into too many details I'm just going to give you the easy peasy. Technology that I use in my business.
And I know From firsthand experience, how it has helped me to make my business run smoother, to almost act as another employee with my business. I am telling you the truth. It is an amazing addition to my company. And it is doing the same for students in my design success academy, who are now implementing technology as well.
So hang in there with me. I'm going to be sharing with you seven pieces of technology that I cannot work without. And I really thought about putting all of the technology that I use into one episode, but it would be probably like, I don't know, like a two hour episode because I use so much, so I will get down to seven pieces of technology that I can't work without.
And that is just going to be in this episode. And I have a feeling. I will be doing another episode down the road, because even in my program, I teach an entire module just about technology and all of the ways that it helps my business And how my students can bring that into their own businesses.
But today I wanted to share seven pieces of technology that I use in my own business from scheduling appointments to signing agreements, technology has fully been embraced in John McClain design and we are all the better for it. And as I said, if you have not gotten on the tech bandwagon yet for fear of it being too complicated, welfare. Fear no more. I am going to, as I said, share my top seven pieces of technology that I cannot work without.
And by the way, that are easy to install and use. and also the cherry on top of this is some of these are completely free. Yes. Free, free, free to use, which is unheard of these days. So the technology that I'm going to be discussing today is going to be around your website. And graphic design software scheduling software. Image and video clipping online storage, video conferencing, and team communication.
Those are the categories that we will be discussing. And I will be sharing the specific software that I use in sight of those. So without further ado drum roll, please. Let's jump in to the first category, which is website design. Now I know. Website design is a big, big thing, and I'm not going to teach you how to design your website.
That is not what I'm going to do. I am going to share with you the website design platform that I use and love. and that is show it. I use show it website design for my website, end, by the way, you can go to the show notes in whatever platform you're listening to this podcast. There is a link to all of the software and technology that we are mentioning here and if you go to the show notes, you can use the link provided there, and it will give you a trial of show it for one free month just by using the link. But I love show it for several reasons. So here's how I used it.
I had my web designer Create my website using show it. And I did that for a couple of reasons. First of all, show, it is truly drag and drop. It is easy, easy, easy to use. There are no blocks. There are no, oh, this has to be this way. This has to be that way. If you can do PowerPoint, you can do show it.
That is the truth. Everything can be placed anywhere, anywhere you want to put it. That's where it can end up. Anything that you want to have a hyperlink add to it. You can do that. Any color, any font, all those things can be totally customized within show it. Now the way that I did it, I, as I said, was have my website designer set up my website. And I did that because I wanted it to look professional.
And the beauty of that is I can now go in and change things internally with my team and we can change little things here and there without having to call my web designer to change those things. I have personally set up so many pages on my own website because it is so easy and frankly, I love doing it.
It's kind of fun and show it makes it super easy. This is not. Uh, commercial for show it, by the way, I'm just telling you how easy it really is. And if you've ever done WordPress or any of the other website platforms that are out there, you know how sometimes complicated it can get, but when you play around with show it, you will see that it is really, really easy.
And again, if you have products and you're having a sale, Or for me, for instance, with my courses, I want to launch a new course where I want to put something on sale. I can pop on there and simply make the changes myself. Or if there is a misspell, I can change it over the weekend.
I don't have to contact my web developer to do that. It is easy, easy, easy for myself and my team members to make those changes. And here's the best part too. I love being able to take a package on or off of the platform. Whenever I want. As a for instance, we have several packages such as real estate refresh or design in a box.
And some of these packages we don't sell all of the time. And simply by going onto the platform and on the clicking, the little eyeball that activates it to be shown on mobile or on desktop, it will deactivate that page from my website. it does not show any more. And then you simply click publish and there you go, that page is removed from your website, but it does not delete that page.
So whenever you want to bring that package back, you just go back on and click the little eyeball and bring it right back to on there whenever you want that package to come back to your website. you see it really, really is easy in the setup and it is even easier in the management of the website.
So show it. Website is my favorite platform for website. It. How I have all of my website set up and you can go to any of my websites and see those John mcclain.co or John McClain, design.com. Design success, academy.com. They are all made in show it, and I love them all now. I will say this the way that I made my websites look so great is using a template.
And I use a template from tonic template shop and tonic. Provides beautiful templates. And that is the template that you will find on my website, John McClain, design.com and I bought the template from tonic end. Again, you can click the link in the show notes, and you will say 15%, if you do decide to purchase a template from tonic. But to me, tonic has the most beautiful templates out there. They are so professional looking and I purchased a template from tonic and then had my web designer really, truly customize it for me, with my colors, with my fonts, all those things and make it my own.
So tonic has several templates. Plates to choose from. Of course there's tons and tons of people who provide templates for show it. But I was just blown away by the way that tonic made it look like something that I would have already designed for myself for my website. And I get so many compliments on my website and it looks like something That I would have designed custom for myself, but I use. A template from tonic.
So check out tonic template shop. And again, go into the show notes and you can say 15%. If you want to click on the link there. Next Canva graphic design software. Canva is my favorite graphic design software. You might have heard of Canva. You might even use Canva.
There is a free version. There is a paid version. I do not even consider any other graphic design software to use. I am not an affiliate with Canva. This is not a paid promotion. I just love them they make it so easy. There are so many templates. There are so many things we use inside of Canva from designing proposals to designing the actual LoDo for this podcast.
We did that inside of Canva. Canva is truly a wonderful place to go to give you inspiration, to give you templates, to give you color palettes. All of those things are inside of there, and if you're looking just for inspiration, it is a wonderful place to start to find inspiration for your designs.
So canva.com is so, so good for graphic design. As I said, there is a free version and a pro version. I think the pro version is so worth it. I always do the pro version. You get a few more bells and whistles, you get a few more templates, you get a lot of images to use.
I use Canva for a lot of things. I actually use it for their images as well. They have a lot of stock images inside of it that are really great. And you can use those for your advertisement as you can use those for things on your website. You can actually even design a website page inside of canvas, if you wish, but presentations. Proposals documents.
All of those things you can do inside of Canva. I could not run my business without canvas. So check out Canva. It is amazing. Okay. Now let's talk about scheduling software. I have checked out every imaginable way to schedule things for my calendar. And I have narrowed it down to two that I really have found to be the most helpful. Those are Calendly or acuity. Those are the scheduling software systems that I find to be the most helpful for personally, I choose acuity, but they both do the same things.
They both allow people to schedule appointments with you based upon your schedule. We use them for consultations. On our website, we embed them right on the website where people can schedule their consultations with us. We also use them for discovery calls. We have them embedded right on the website where people can schedule their discovery calls with our team.
They go onto our website. They choose their time. That time is linked and synced with our Google calendars. So when they are choosing times, we know that it is synced with our calendar. So there is no worry about us being double booked for something. And I also love it because we will add a questionnaire to that.
So when they are completing their discovery call, we will add in a questionnaire and they have to answer a few questions before they can book the discovery call. And the other icing on the cake is that they get reminders that the discovery call will happen. And you can set up the reminders to happen as you choose.
I choose to have the reminders go out one week before and one day before just to make sure that people remember the appointments with us, but we love our calendar scheduling software And I use it for a lot of different reasons as well. I use it for any interviews that I might be having.
use it for any sort of personal meetings that I might want to have. You can create private links and personal links as well. And I can tell you that we have taken vacations before. Where my entire team was out of the office. And we still have had booked consultations that were paid and entered into our system when no one was in the office.
So this goes back to where I told you. at the beginning of the podcast, that it almost acts as another employee in your office. That's exactly what happened with us, where we would leave the office. No one would even be in the office and we would still get booked appointments and they were paid because these platforms will also. Allow you to add Stripe. And PayPal and accept payments for your consultations there as well.
So checked out Calendly or acuity and see which one you prefer and get your calendar scheduling software set up Your calendar will thank you for it. And again, remember the key for that is to sync it.
with your Google calendar or whatever calendar you use for your personal calendar and for your appointments, make sure that you sync those two together so that you are not double booking your appointments.
Oh, and I did want to mention that they both have a trial period, but Calendly actually has a free version. If you want to check that out, you can actually use Calendly for free. Of course, it has limited options with their free version, but you can use Calendly completely free.
So definitely check that out. Okay, this is a simple one, but I should not let technology go without mentioning my favorite little easy peasy thing that I use. And that is the snipping tool I use. Believe it or not, I'm not a Mac user. I'm a windows user, a PC user. And it is the snipping tool. It is a lifesaver for me. It is simply the little snipping tool that has windows base.
There is a Mac version of it called grab, I believe, but the windows version is called snipping. Snipping tool. And really the snipping tool is a screen capture utility that is included for free with the windows operating system. And it allows you to take screenshots of your computer screen and save them as image files.
But what I love about it is you can actually record video as well. So if you want to record an MP4, you can do that also with the snipping tool.
Keep in mind that it does not record audio. It is just recording what is on your screen, but it is a video capture of what is on your screen, which is still pretty cool. you can capture a rectangular area or free form area, a window or an entire screen. It includes editing tools inside of it. So you can crop and highlight and add text to your image or a video. It's really useful for capturing images of specific areas of your screen.
So if you have an error message, or if you want to do a screenshot of a website or some other visual information, it is really helpful to relay that information to someone else. I use it all the time and I use it even if I'm needing to, let's say I have a large file of a headshot of myself, and that headshot is so large and I don't need that large file to be sent to someone who wants to use it for their website.
I will simply snip the large file that I have and I will send the file, but I created from the snipping tool to them because I know they just need a smaller resolution file for their website.
So that snipping tool smaller resolution for me. So it just makes it so easy to do that. Or again, let's say that you need to visually walk someone through the steps to do something on your computer screen. You can use the snipping tool to do a video capture of that as well, and then just send that lifesaver for me. It is easy, easy, easy to use. And again, the matte version I believe is called grab. If you want to try that out as well. And these saved to your desktop, I believe by the fault, but I end up saving them in a separate for myself on my Google drive, which we're going to talk about next.
So check out the snipping tool on window based products or grab on Mac based products.
Now let's talk about how to store documents and how to store files. And I use Google drive for that. You have lots of options out there. You have one drive, you have Dropbox, all kinds of options, but for us, Google drive saves the day We use the Google workplace for everything, but Google drive is how we store all of our documents.
I love Google drive because it is a cloud-based storage and collaboration. That's very important to remember. Collaboration platform that offers such a huge range of benefits for everybody involved, especially my team. I like it because it has so much storage options. We can access it from anywhere. you probably will have to end up having to increase the storage.
It comes with a limited amount of storage, but we had to end up increasing that because we had CAD files and all kinds of large documents inside of it. and the other part that I love about it is we are able to easily share and collaborate on things and you can see in real time, Who you are sharing with.
You can see who you are collaborating with any can find exactly what comments those people put into the comments sections of that.
Uh,
the other great part is if you're using Google docs and Google sheets and Google slides inside of there, they save automatically and they will back up automatically. And this will happen across all of your devices. On your phone or on your tablet, it will sync across all of your devices.
And we'll back up And if you are sharing documents with someone, let's say you're writing an article for a magazine that you were featured in. You can just share that Google doc with all that information in there without having to actually email that over to the other person, you can share that document straight from Google And it will save you so much time. For our PR firm.
For instance, we have a folder set up for our PR firm with all of our projects inside of it. and we just share that entire folder with them. So anytime we have a new project that we photograph, we simply upload it into the folder and everybody in the firm has access to it.
And everybody in the PR firm has access to it as well. the sharing capabilities of it are amazing. And if you do use Google workplace, it integrates so, so easily, but it is a brainless easy way to collaborate and share. And you will find that the ease of using it is wonderful. And if you. We're a one person show.
It will save you so much time from not having to stop an email and send everything over to everyone. you can just simply add people as collaborators to your team. And you can share those documents and share those files. Very very easily. if you even want to take it a step further, you can start to create folders for your clients and then share documents with your clients, almost acting as a client portal.
So check out Google drive and see how you would like to incorporate that into your business as well. Two more to go. And I wanted to mention our video conferencing preference, which is something called whereby you may have not heard of whereby it is not one of the larger platforms out there, but a client recommended this to us years ago. when we tried it out and continued to enjoy it and have used it ever since.
So it's whereby w H E R E B Y. And by the way, remember, all of these are in the notes section of the podcast. You can find these. There. So go and look there for all of the links to these, but whereby is a video conferencing software system, kind of like zoom, but also not. Um, I liked whereby because you have a dedicated website where you can send people to go to meet with you every time.
So you can say whereby.com/the name of your business. And that is your dedicated page, where everybody can go to find you every time they want to meet with you. It's never like a super complicated link. It is always the dedicated link that you have, which I find very easy.
So we use whereby in a couple of ways we use it internally. I have an internal whereby page where our team will go to meet internally.
So, if we need to meet from, let's say two different offices, or if someone is working from home and someone is in the office. We have an internal whereby linked where we will jump on and say, Hey, do you want to meet on whereby we will jump on whereby have a video conversation. And it is strictly for our internal team and that link never changes.
We also have one for clients where we meet with them for presentations as well, or meet with them about their project. And then we have one that I have set up for meetings that I have for any sort of interviews that I do. So you can set up these ever how you want, but I liked them again because they are easy to navigate.
You have your own dedicated link. and by the way, whereby is also very, very, just user friendly. You don't have to download any software. You use it directly in the browser. the user experience is also great as well. So check out whereby.com.
It's pretty affordable to you can sign up by the month. You don't have to have a longterm agreement. And I believe currently the lowest price for the platform is around seven bucks per month, if I'm not mistaken, but check out whereby.com and see what you think about it as well.
And I did want to mention too, by the way, that everything is safe and everything is encrypted on there. So your information is safe on whereby and that was something that was important to us as well. We had to make sure that all of our information that we shared on there was safe and encrypted and it is so check out whereby.com and see what you think.
And lastly, but definitely not leastly.
I want to talk about slack. If you have not checked out slack, you need to check out slack. We love slack. And before you get worried about slack and confused about what it is, let me just tell you, you don't have to spend any money to try slack. It is free. Slack has a great free version that you can use for as long as you need.
It has limitations. Of course, I believe the free version only keeps track of data for 90 days, but the free version is very, very good. And there is of course a paid version, but slack is great for internal communication. And I'll tell you why we brought in slack. One time there was a software that we were using that you had client communication and internal communication with our team members, all in one system.
Well, when we did that accidentally once one of my team members messaged the client, instead of messaging me and it wasn't a detrimental message, but nevertheless, the client was not too happy about what she read. So she canceled her agreement and it was a huge project. Uh, could not talk her off of the ledge for that one, for anything., so I decided then in there that we will keep client communication. 100% separate from my team communication.
And that is where slack came in. We don't even message each other via email anymore. We only use slack for communication for my team, because it is so simple. It is so easy. And it is so fast and it is just the way to do it. You set up slack with different channels, you can set up a channel for every client like we do.
And then you can also set up a channel for marketing. you didn't really set up a channel for anything that you want, but you can also have private channels where you can message team members directly. I even used slack to message myself.
And what I mean by that is if I need to send myself an image from my computer, for something that I want to post onto Instagram, I will send the message to myself. I will put that image in slack, on my desktop, and then that will pop up on my phone app and I can download that image from slack onto my phone.
So there's so many ways to use slack And again, we. We don't ever have to worry about client communication, getting mixed up with our team communication because they are totally, totally separate. so slack has truly organized my team and it kept our communication in line.
And it also has video capabilities now with a mechanism that they call huddle, where you can jump onto a video call or an audio call inside of slack and do an actual audio or video call on the spot if you want.
But I liked the way it's organized. I like the way that it has the channels set up inside of it. So that if you message someone about a project, you know, that it is about that project because your messaging inside of that quote unquote channel. Channel. And then again, We set up channels for different things within our company.
So we have channels for inspiration. We have channels for new vendors. We have channels for marketing, as I said, and then we have channels for every single client and then private channels for each team member.
So my team members can message each other directly and then I can message my team members directly as well. So slack has been a game. Changer for us and I never see us taking that away from our platform of communication because it has honestly organized our communication. So well, and My team.
And I now know that we will only message one another inside of slack, and we don't have to worry about Chris crossing paths with our clients any longer.
so there you have it. Those are seven pieces of technology that I cannot work without, and my firm, and I hope that they have enlightened you and have intrigued you. And maybe you want to consider bringing these into your company as well.
Remember you don't have to be a large firm or a large company to bring these in. Some of these are great for solopreneurs as well, but they're. They're not complicated. I don't want you to feel that technology is complicated. The whole point of technology is to make your job easier. Now there will be a learning curve just as anything has a learning curve.
But once you sit down and just take the time to learn, how it works, you will really start to see the benefits of it. And it will shave minutes off your day and hours off your wheat. And really days off review year, I am not exaggerating. And once you get that thing humming along, it will act as an employee for your company and you will be eternally grateful for how technology can really, really help you.
go into the show notes, to find more about these pieces of technology. And if you want to find more, and if you're truly wanting to know all of the technology that I use, You can find them in my design success academy, where I really go in depth on all of the technology that I bring into my company, because there's so many more things that we use.
And I actually talked about how we set up those technology pieces as well. But these seven pieces of technology are things that I know are going to help you just as much as they help us. So good luck on your technology journey. Let me know what you think about these. If you do decide to incorporate these into your business and don't feel like you have to do them all at one time, start out slowly Try maybe one per month and start bringing them slowly into your business and let me know how that goes.
and I will see you on the next episode of the designer within and until then keep designing a business and a life that you love. See you soon.
Thanks for sticking with me to the end of the designer within podcast. It means the world to me. If you're ready to dive deeper into the topics that we've discussed here, be sure to check out my online coaching and courses program, design success academy. com here. I will teach you everything you need to know to run your interior design business.
From starting the project all the way to the end, including marketing and pricing your services for profit. And for more information on this podcast, including how to be a guest or my design services in general, go to johnmcclain. co. That's johnmcclain. co. See you soon, friend.