[00:00:00] EMMA: I'm going to save you months of trial and error. These five tools quietly run my coaching business in the background. Over the last nine years, I have spent many, many thousands of dollars trying different platforms. I've chased shiny objects. Oh, have I chased shiny objects. Someone will post a screenshot of some gorgeous dashboard, and I'd think, "That's it.
[00:00:23] That's the one. That's going to change everything." I've migrated systems. I've moved my whole business from one place to another, and then some. And then some time later, moved it all again. I've paid consultants. I've paid monthly subscriptions that I genuinely forgot I even had. And I've promised more than once that this platform, this one right here, would change everything.
[00:00:46] And here's what I've discovered after all of that money and all of that faffing about. There is not one magical platform out there that suddenly Makes your business organized and profitable and [00:01:00] stress-free all at once. Software doesn't build businesses. What does? We do, the business owners. The right software simply helps you do what you're already committed to doing.
[00:01:12] That's it. That's the whole trick. It removes friction from the things you were always going to do anyway. What they do do is make it easier for me to spend time in my business where it actually matters, which is coaching women to build their business and building my own business, right? All right. Let's jump in.
[00:01:31] Tool number one, in no particular order, although you'll soon see I have a favorite, uh, GoHighLevel. If you have followed me for a while, you'll know we've changed CRMs over the years, and today, today, we finally land on a version of GoHighLevel. I'm a business owner who wants systems, and I want systems that make running my business easier.
[00:01:52] If something happens more than three times in your business, it probably deserves a system. We need to have systems, [00:02:00] especially women, because the less brain space I spend remembering admin, following up with the people manually, or lying awake wondering where somebody is in the process, the more brain space I have to coach women, and that is exactly where I should be spending my time.
[00:02:16] So what does GoHighLevel actually do in my business? First of all, it's where we manage our sales pipeline. Every single inquiry comes into GoHighLevel, whether that is someone's downloaded a guide from us, whether they have joined our newsletter list, whether they've inquired about coaching or booked a call or registered for an event, we know exactly where they are.
[00:02:38] My pipeline is not living in my head anymore. Now, it lives inside a system, and it's off my shoulders. Secondly, we use it to manage our social media. So I have a social media manager, Bec from Creative Seed Co. Amazing. She manages all of our socials. She loads every post into GoHighLevel, every caption, every graphic.
[00:02:58] So Bec loads all of it [00:03:00] in, and then I jump in and I review everything. I tweak what I need to. I approve it or I don't approve it. Instead of emails flying back and forward saying, "Can you just check this? Did you see the other one? Have you missed the email? What about the caption on Thursday's post?"
[00:03:14] Everything lives in one place, and it's really simple. It's organized. If you've got things flying around in email threads and DMs and text messages and WhatsApp, you already know how much brain space that eats up, and this gets it all under one roof. Third, we are right in the middle of moving all of our core client programs from Kajabi into GoHighLevel.
[00:03:39] But the reason that we're, we're doing it is that we're trying really hard to simplify the business. Fewer platforms, less duplications, fewer mistakes, more things living under one roof. And the word simplify, it's gonna do a lot of heavy li- 'Cause complexity is really expensive, not just in the dollars, in [00:04:00] subscriptions that you forget about, in the mental load of running six different tools.
[00:04:05] And a lot of people don't necessarily realize this about GoHighLevel, it's incredibly popular with marketing agencies. Loads of agencies build entire client systems into it, funnels, automations, email campaigns, websites, the lot, and then they manage those systems on behalf of their clients. So is GoHighLevel the magical unicorn system I'd spent years searching for?
[00:04:30] No, it isn't. But it has given my business structure, and that, for me, is worth its weight in gold. It has taken off some of my mental load, which I really, really love. Tool number two This is my favorite. It's called Marco Polo. Before I landed on Marco Polo, believe me, I did my homework. Because here's the thing, I wasn't looking for another app, but what I was actually looking for was the best way to support women while they were [00:05:00] genuinely building their businesses.
[00:05:02] And what Marco Polo gave me that none of the others could was face-to-face video messaging. It's a genuine conversation on video that you can send whenever it suits you, and you basically record it when you've got a moment, and then the other person can either watch it immediately or later that night when the kids are in bed, or the next morning when they're having their coffee.
[00:05:27] There's, like, no pressure for everyone to be sitting there, like on a Zoom, available at exactly the same time. And video lets me communicate in the way that feels most natural to me. But here's the most important part. It lets me see my clients. Sometimes a woman will jump on Marco Polo with what sounds like a very straightforward pricing question.
[00:05:51] On paper, it would be a pricing question. On email, it would be a pricing question. But what I actually see is that she's exhausted. I can see that she's [00:06:00] lacking confidence. I can see that she's actually a little bit overwhelmed. Now, instead of firing off a quick email saying, "Great. Let's discuss this in our next session in three weeks' time," I can jump into Marco Polo straight in, and I can help them unpack what's really happening for them.
[00:06:19] Let me paint you a picture. Imagine you see your coach once a month. You leave that session feeling like you could run through a brick wall. Then Tuesday comes. Difficult client emails. A proposal gets rejected. You lose a little bit of that confidence. You start second-guessing every decision you were so sure about just a week ago.
[00:06:38] And by the time your next coaching session kind of comes around, three weeks later, the moment's gone. The learning opportunity, the real one, has disappeared. I've never believed that once a month is enough. I just don't think business is lived once a month. Business is lived every single day in real [00:07:00] time with real feelings.
[00:07:01] So why on earth should coaching only happen once a month? My intention with Marco Polo has always been really simple. I wanna be contactable. I want to be able to help my clients while they're in it, not four weeks after it's already happened. Now, whenever I tell people this, someone inevitably asks me the question, "So Emma, are you on all the time?
[00:07:24] Are you just, like, glued to your phone answering Marco Polos at all hours?" And the answer is no. This is what I've learned about boundaries. People are incredibly respectful if you have boundaries. My clients know I'll respond. They know I I won't necessarily reply the second they hit send, and that is completely okay.
[00:07:47] They're not necessarily looking for instant access to me. They're looking for support And there's a difference. I think instant is not the same as support. [00:08:00] Instant becomes a crutch, and that's not what we wanna do. And in nine years, I've only had really one client who really tested it, and let me tell you about her because this is a really interesting one.
[00:08:10] So she signed up with us for 12 months, that's our normal one-on-one coaching, and she used Marco every single day. Within three months, she'd untangled almost everything that felt broken in her business, and then she decided she didn't need coaching anymore. Now, I disagreed, and not because I wanted to keep another client because that is not what we do here.
[00:08:31] I disagreed because she had fixed the things that were broken, but she hadn't built what was possible yet. And so she'd solved today's problems, she'd sorted out her systems and bits and pieces, but she hadn't yet developed the skill I think that changes everything in the long term. You know it, business development.
[00:08:50] And within a year, she'd returned to her corporate world. Because for every one story like that, there are hundreds of women who've made better decisions, avoided [00:09:00] costly mistakes, celebrated wins they might otherwise have let slip past, and felt less alone because they had someone walking alongside them while they were in it.
[00:09:09] We've also been experimenting with using Marco Polo in our small group coaching. Some people absolutely love it. It's the raging extroverts. They're chatting away, they're celebrating other people's wins, and then there's others who don't naturally gravitate towards it, and you know what? That's okay. Not everyone communicates in the same way.
[00:09:29] But what I do love is that it keeps us all connected between the sessions. It does exactly what I wanted it to do, and that is it reminds women that they're not alone. No woman stands on their own. That is my favorite tool. Tool number three, Big VU. All right. Let's talk about showing up online. People often assume that because I am speaking on this podcast or I do speaking for a living, I can just hit record and off I go.
[00:09:54] I don't think so. Sometimes I can. Sometimes I'm in the zone, and the words are flowing, and it's beautiful. Some days, [00:10:00] the words are hiding in the back of my head and refuse to come out, and that's where Big VU comes in. It's my teleprompter. I rarely write word for word scripts. That's just not me. If I read a full script, I sound like a robot.
[00:10:14] What I usually have is prompts, stories I wanna tell, questions I wanna pose, bullet points, the shape of what I wanna say, not the exact words. But having those prompts right there beside the camera completely changes how I feel. My shoulders come down. I stay looking at you. I stay looking at the camera instead of glancing down at my notes on the desk every few seconds.
[00:10:34] The best part is I don't sound like a robot, and it actually helps me be more present, more myself because the nervous energy of trying to remember everything is gone And that's my whole test for a tool, really. If a tool removes friction, it's worth having. And BigVU removes friction between me and showing up, and that's a keeper.
[00:10:56] Tool four, it's called Virtually Myself, and it's [00:11:00] owned by one of my smartest friends, Alex Hagen, and also Nina Christian. And before I tell you why I love it, let me say something about AI in general. AI is only as good as the information you give it. Crap in, crap out. If your thinking is scattered across notebooks and Google documents and old PowerPoint presentations and books you've written and folders you have and half-finished ideas and Notes app in your phone, oh my goodness.
[00:11:26] AI's not going to magically go in, reach into all of those places, and organize that all for you. It doesn't know where your genius is hiding. And that's exactly why I was drawn to Virtually Myself. The way I describe Virtually Myself is it takes everything in your head and everything scattered across your drives and your slide decks and your half-finished Canva projects and your drafts, and it starts organizing it into something that's a little bit more useful.
[00:11:54] And I wanna stress that word. It's not just organized. It's actually useful. The goal is [00:12:00] to actually use those ideas to help people and to generate revenue. Now I don't know about you, but I did not start my business so I could spend every waking minute creating content. It's weird to admit that because, um, you know, I've just finished writing my second book.
[00:12:17] Writing a book is one thing. It's like a ... It has a finish and an end, and then you start marketing the thing, right? But feeling like you're feeding the content machine every single day forever, that is something completely different, something I don't wanna do, and it's exhausting. And it's one of the fastest ways I know to burn a business owner out.
[00:12:35] What I want is for my ideas to be captured once, stored properly, and then distributed well in lots of different places without me having to reinvent the wheel every single time. Mm-mm. Virtually Myself helps me capture my intellectual property in a way that actually makes sense to me. It learns my language.
[00:12:54] It learns my frameworks. It learns how I think and how I say those things. So what actually [00:13:00] comes out of the other end sounds like me. But The feature I love the most isn't even the AI part. It's called the Vault. Everything lives in one private place. It's mine. It's not shared. It's hosted here in Australia.
[00:13:16] It's GDPR aware, and it's been built specifically for experts who simply cannot afford to leak their intellectual property. I think a lot of women in business underestimate that they even have intellectual property. Many of us, our thinking is our business. We have frameworks. We have FAQs. We have stories we tell.
[00:13:39] We do coaching. We have processes. That's not a nice-to-have. That's an actual product. That's what people pay us for. So I think we should protect it. And what Virtually Myself does is it gives those assets a home. If your ideas don't have somewhere to kinda live or a home to go to, you'll spend years recreating work you've already done.[00:14:00]
[00:14:00] You've built the same framework three times because you can't find the first two and the pretty version. We lose time, and we lose energy. I would much rather spend my time creating new ideas than trying to remember where on earth I saved the old ones. So that is Virtually Myself. The fifth tool I wanna tell you about is Tide.
[00:14:22] Technically, it's a meditation app, and it's part of how I stay aligned and how I do my CEO time. But that's not really why or how I use Tide. I use Tide to focus. I love working in cafes. Well, partly because of the coffee, but, um, more because of the noise. Random. I like the chatter. I like the coffee machine hissing.
[00:14:42] I like the banging the plates, the general buzz of people going about their day, and I don't actually have to talk to anyone. There's something about all that background noise that helps my brain actually settle down and get to work. Complete silence, oddly, makes me slightly twitchy Now, [00:15:00] obviously I can't spend every second of the working day sitting in a cafe, so I fake it.
[00:15:05] I open up Tide, I choose the cafe sounds, and I either pop my headphones on or put it on speaker, and suddenly I'm sitting there in my office or at my kitchen table. In my head, it feels like I'm actually working at my favorite cafe. And when I need to write or think or plan or just get a big piece of work finished and out the door, that's what happens.
[00:15:26] Headphones in, cafe sounds on, off I go. And it's honestly funny how something that simple can make such a big difference to whether I have a productive afternoon or just a fidgety one. So there you have it, the five tools that genuinely earn their place in my business every single day. GoHighLevel, Marco Polo, Big VU, Virtually Myself, and Tide.
[00:15:49] But I need to just come back to where I started, right? None of them built my business. People did. Conversations did. Consistency did. Business development [00:16:00] did. These tools simply help me do those things just a little bit better. They remove the friction. They give me structure. They hand me back the brain space to do the work that actually moves the needle.
[00:16:10] That's their job, and that's all their job is. So if you're sitting there right now and you're listening to this and you're searching for the perfect platform, one that's gonna finally sort out everything, I need you to do one thing. Just one. Stop. Choose you something that's good enough, learn it properly, build your systems around it, and then spend the rest of your energy serving your clients, because that's where the magic actually happens, with clients, not in the software.
[00:16:39] In you and the women and the men that you serve. Next time, I'm sharing my thoughts on GoHighLevel versus Kajabi. I can't wait to see you there. Thanks for listening to Tea with the Queen. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It really does help to get the word out.
[00:16:59] [00:17:00] For more about me, please visit emmamcqueen.com.au, and I look forward to your company next episode.
