Ellie McBride - From Big Ideas to Real Impact: Simple Systems to Make It Happen

00:00  Hey, welcome to from big ideas to real impact, simple systems to make it happen i'm Ellie and I'm really excited to be here as part of the Rule breaking Entrepreneur Summit. Before we go too much further, I should warn you, I have hiccups and I'm trying my best. All right, so we're talking about how to make things happen because the best ideas in the world will not go anywhere without a plan. Many entrepreneurs get stuck because the executing things feels overwhelming. There's really big ideas, and how do you get them actually done when they're feel so big, right? The goal of this workshop is to give you the structure and systems to bring your ideas to life without overcomplicating things.    

00:53  So a little bit about me, my name is Ellie McBride. I am the founder and CEO of Calibrated Concepts. I'm originally from Oregon, but I spent the last seven years living in Ireland and I recently moved back to my hometown of Pendleton, oregon for the first time since I was 17, and I've been here about six months. We're excitedly awaiting adopting our new puppy. He this is the first time we're normally adopt don't shop people this is the first time we're going to get a puppy and I have a deeply rooted belief that women and people who are socialized as women are overworked and that tech is a key piece in solving that puzzle and giving ourselves permission to do nothing for once in our lives.    

01:42  I do what I do because I hate seeing businesses struggle with the task that should be automated, feel easy, or be outsourced. I don't like entrepreneurs to feel like they have to do it all, but I and I know that there's another way and I help show it to them.    

02:03  You don't need more ideas, you need a way to actually make them freaking happen, right? The biggest rule we're breaking today is that things have to be complicated to be effective or that you have to work really hard to get where you want to go. We are giving ourselves permission to make it easy and to keep it simple simple.    

02:24  So you know what you want to do. So why does it feel so freaking impossible to get it done? The three biggest bottlenecks I see are you are too much in your head, so you're not capturing your ideas. You're not you don't have a way to manage all the things happening up in here you're not streamlining your tasks and everything is resting on on your brain, on your head. And you're not necessarily making effective use of a team and things like that. Another thing I see a lot is scattered or messy systems. So, you know, you might have 17 notebooks, 5 spreadsheets that you've tried to make it work in a sauna or Notion or until you've you've got all these things everywhere and you don't have one consistent system or cohesive systems.    

03:21  If you're using more than one thing to actually get stuff done and finished and over the finish line. The third thing I see is that people try and do everything themself. This keeps you in the weeds of things and doesn't let you get to the CEO side of things, to being the visionary you want a need to be for your business. So if you're doing everything yourself and not outsourcing things or automating things, you are never going to be able to scale beyond a certain point and you're never going to feel like your business is easy or restful.    

03:55  It's going to feel like you're constantly on this hamster wheel of having to get things done.    

04:02  Your systems don't need to be perfect there's no right one way to do something, but they do need to work for you.    

04:12  So let's talk a little bit about the myth of winging it. Creativity thrives with structure i firmly believe this so many of my clients come and they have ADHD, or they're nerd Vergent, or they're just a free spirit and they think that because they are, that's how their brain works or their personality works. That feel that systems are going to trap them or they're going to make it so they're less able to be creative or less able to create their art.    

04:45  And that is just not true. When you create a structure around it, you create more freedom and availability for your brain and you get to do more of the creative and fun side of your work. The I'll figure it out later is a way that a lot of people that I work with, these ideas they have that they just never get to make happen because they are too busy winging it.    

05:14  The other myth I hear quite a lot is the myth of high touch. A lot of service providers will want to offer this really high touch offer and they're working with people they love working with and they want to feel like that people are getting the best of them. But the thing about that is I like, I do that for my clients my clients get the very best of me. But high touch doesn't mean that everything is done manually it doesn't mean that everything is done by yourself. Like you cannot offer a high touch service if you're too busy doing your accounting, if you're too busy sending scheduling links, if you're too busy following up on 20 million emails.    

05:56  Like that is not how you offer the best of yourself to your clients.    

06:03  So 3 core systems that every single business needs.    

06:10  Are a way to capture and prioritize your ideas a way to organize and track your workflows and a way to automate and delegate let's talk a little bit about that. You need to capture and prioritize your ideas so that nothing gets lost in the chaos of life life is a messy thing. You can't, it's unpredictable and so being able to have that something concrete to refer back to and to add to is essential.    

06:35  You also need a way to organize and track your workflows. This is so projects actually move forward without you micromanaging every single step, right? Or without pieces of those steps getting lost. And then you need to automate and delegate so you can focus on that CEO level work or that creative work that you want to do and not the admin boring, repetitive stuff that you don't need to be doing.    

07:05  So let's talk a little bit about system one. When you capture and prioritize, I want you to brain dump and filter everything you need to get done. And so I want you to take the time to write everything you do in a day and a week down and then you And so, and then I want you to think, does this really need done? Can I outsource this and we're going to talk a bit more about that. Or can I cut it loose, right? Is this something that is not moving the needle forward is it not bringing me towards my goals? Cut it loose.    

07:43  But what I want you to do is bring up everything put and figure out one place that everything's going to go that can be a sauna it could be Notion, it could be in Google Docs. I use a sauna for my business almost exclusively for project planning, task planning, brainstorming, team meetings, those kinds of things because it's so robust and we can break things down into various tasks and timelines and calendars.    

08:15  And it means that once I which we'll talk about in one of the next ones, but it means that I can delegate really effectively within that process program. So once you have all of your ideas, all of your tasks, all of your projects all written down in one place, filter it down like we talked about, is this a now project is this a next project or is this a someday maybe idea? And then also, is this something that I even want to be doing is this something that feels like it's gut wrenching to do, draining to do? Is it actually moving me towards my goals have be really real with yourself be blunt with yourself because it's going to save you a lot of heartache.    

09:02  Ok, System 2 is from idea to action. So this is the idea to execution pipeline, right? So once you have one of the so once you have one of those big needy goals that you've written down, you've brainstormed it all out, break it into milestones so if that is one of the things we want to do in my business is to set some Google ads to, to, sorry, some Facebook and Instagram ads to my quiz that I've had.    

09:31  And so break that into milestones we need to do the research, we need to create the graphics, we need to do the copywriting, we need to do some AB testing. We need to set the audiences like there's so many pieces of how that's going to work and to make sure it's really, really effective so breaking those all into milestones, assigning pieces of it to me and my team, having meetings about it if necessary, assigning deadlines and tracking progress and whatever progress means to you. So for me, I want to have by the end of this quarter, I want to have those out and being beta tested and refined so that we can run them first so that we can run them for a few months and decide if we want our quiz to be continue to be our keystone lead magnet or if my, me and my team need to come up with a more effective lead magnet for the rest of 2025 and going into 2026 Simple structure equals faster execution so I want you to, if you were doing this on the Google Doc, if you're doing set up check boxes set up, you can if you're doing this in a Google Doc, you can tag any collaborators.    

10:40  If you're doing this in a Google Doc, you can even do set due dates and things like that. If you're doing this in a Notion, it's the same like there's so much you can do in there just make sure that you're working somewhere ideally that you can collaborate because even if it's just you right now, you want a need to grow one of my biggest things, and we'll get this in a moment, actually, let's go. One of my biggest things is that people wait to delegate until it's too late not too late, but they wait too long.    

11:10  People think that they need to be making a certain amount of money or have a certain amount of projects on and things like that to be able to effectively delegate, to make it worth their while to delegate. But if you're waiting until you feel like you're ready or you're overwhelmed or you're overworked, you've waited too long and you've missed a lot of key opportunities. So let's talk about automating and delegating. Stop doing everything manually. You shouldn't be handling things like scheduling, invoicing, follow-ups repetitive client emails like the same things you said to every single client you shouldn't be doing that manually. There's so many fantastic tools, tools out there i talk about tools all the time i have a really good blog post I did at the end of last year, early this year about all the tools that I use in my business, my own tech stack so you can check that out.    

12:01  But tools like Dubsado for client relationship management that handle all of your emails, invoicing that handle client handholding and forms and contracts and all that kind of thing, Acuity or Calendly for things like scheduling that is my number one tip. If you feel overwhelmed and want to take back more of your time, set up a scheduler. Protect your time. Anytime somebody wants to pick your brain or have a quick call or wonder how this thing should go or can I be on your podcast or can you be on my podcast, make that a systemized scheduler protects your time means you will only be able to do those activities.    

12:43  People only book in at the times you've designated and it's so easy and there's so many good, even free options out there. Another thing that I recommend is Zapier, Zapier so Zapier connects to all your tools if they're not connected already. So it's such a fantastic resource for making all of your tools talk. So if you need something to go between your email system and Slack or between your shop and oh goodness, your email marketing tool, it probably can do that for you so that you're freeing up automate. Like all these things, if somebody signs up for your program and you want them to get an automated email, but you're the tools you've chosen aren't natively integrated, check out Zapier.    

13:33  Ok, so I've harped on automating, I've harped on delegating. These are huge these are the biggest things I talk about. I have a lot of resources on my website about both of your unsure about what to do. Like I have a how to hire toolkit. I have a lot of information about where to start with automating. I have tool kits around so many of these things and blog posts and YouTube videos so much for you to dive in deeper if that's what you want. All right, So my rule to live by is if you're doing something you hate or you feel like it's a waste of time and you have to do it more than a couple of times, automate it, delegate it, make a template for it so it makes it easier and or hand it off.    

14:18  So in my business, a lot of times if I have an email i have an email I send over and over and over again i create a template and then I send it off. If I have a task like importing all my expenses at the end of the month, I have a create a loom, which is a screen recording. And I have that in a task in my Asana program and my assistant does that at the end of every month and I don't even have to think about it. So there's so many little things and I just want to my last point on this around harping on delegating is most V as you can work with for as low as 5 hours a month.    

14:52  So a lot of V as you're not going to be going to be needing to spend thousands and thousands of dollars or even hundreds and hundreds of dollars. You can work with some really great people and work on an hourly, even an hourly or short small package basis if you're just starting out without sourcing all right, some more just bonus tips around how to protect your time and actually get shit done.    

15:18  Don't get distracted. Reduce task shifting. So that's when you have to let go from 1 task to another task to another task so you're in the middle of a client project and suddenly you get an email or text message or an Instagram alert. Like reduce that task shifting by either using the Pomodoro technique, which is essentially setting a timer i'm going to focus on this for the next 15 minutes, the next 20 minutes, the next 45 minutes, whatever it is i don't really recommend going longer than an hour because our brains aren't really great at staying focused, staying focused for that long usually.    

15:51  Or turn on Do not disturb mode if you have Apple or if you have any other phone or computer, most of them have this feature where you can set it so that so that you can go into some form of focus mode. Use it. It's it's a game changer and reduce how many times you're checking emails. You don't need to be accessible to everyone every all the time. Most people who work for themselves do not need to be that reactive you don't need to be getting back to people even in in the time frame of within a day like people I have it in my contract, people can expect to hear from me within two business days most of the time.    

16:32  Usually I'm a lot faster than that, but it does protect me and my piece if I'm in the middle of something. So limit how often you're checking your emails i recommend two to three times a day and not just constantly. And the reason for that really quick is because it, it's so easy to get pulled into that those admini tasks are just replying to people, replying to people and then going, where the hell did all my time go where did my focus time go where do I, when do I'm going to do this work? All right now I'm going to ask you to take action.    

17:05  Pick one thing from today's session. Pick one big goal and implement it. Go through, break it down into small pieces and start working on it. I really want to hear what you've chosen if I can and tell me all about all about it like tell me if you have any questions around hey, I have software that I need to do or I this is the problem I'm facing. Can we find a solution for this? I'm so up for it. So if you want more help, you can find my socials, my website, my.    

17:36  Podcast my high value quiz all at calibrated concepts dot com forward slash hello or you can go to calibrated concepts dot com forward slash quiz for a very juicy quiz that is all about how to get you unstuck what's 1 system that is keeping you stuck that you, you know, or where are you wasting all this time in your business? And it's got complete like such actionable steps and really in depth tutorials on how to get you unstuck. So again, I'm Ellie, I'm over here at Calibrated Concepts if you have any questions, I'd love to hear them.    

18:10  You can find me over at calibratedconcepts.com forward slash hello, and that that's you can link into my site, my blog, my YouTube, my socials. Any way that you want to get in touch with me, I'd love to hear from you.