CapsuleCRM, GarageBand, Female Entrepreneur Association and Hobbies with Susan Heaton-Wright of Executive Voice.

What We Recommended:

Tools & Apps

• Google Calendar – Susan uses this to plan out her time and time block for tasks
  
  Entrepreneur’s Planner – we didn’t discuss which planner Sue uses (what an omission!) but I recommend the Ultimate Planner that ‘invented’ by podcast guest you haven’t heard from yet!


• CapsuleCRM – Susan uses this customer relationship management tool with the ‘task option’ to manage work for, and with clients. “I find it a very useful way of tracking where I am with a particular client and the relationship, how far it’s gone if that makes sense.”


• Tip from Jo – In CapsuleCRM you can use the ‘tracks’ functionality where you can set up a list of tasks that need to happens for something, and then you can set it to create those tasks automatically based on the date you’ve put it in or the date that something is due. “So if I’m speaking somewhere I kick off the speaking track for that particular contact and it will put in all the dates for confirming the speaking title and writing the slides and sending them to the people and all that sort of thing which I find useful. I have one for writing guest blogs as well, so if I’ve got a publishing deadline.”


• Asana – a project management tool (used to manage these podcasts) “I use Asana if I’m working with somebody else. we will use that together so that we track where things are going, but now I’ve got this idea of tracker within Capsule. I think that I might change.”


• GarageBand – a music creation studio on a Mac. “I love GarageBand. I’m a Mac fan and I love my GarageBand. In fact for proposals to clients I now do a little mini podcast for them just to say, “I’d love to work with you. Having chatted on the phone about this I think X, Y, and Z would be perfect for you for training.” it just gives a little bit of a personalised touch to the proposal, and because it’s about speaking it marries perfectly with showing what I do. “

Other Resources

• Female Entrepreneur Association – “I love learning. I love finding out more about things. I think that you probably are the same. Always interested in new things, getting more knowledge. I’m a member of the Female Entrepreneur Association. Carrie Green. I don’t know if you’ve come across her.
  
  She’s absolutely wonderful, and she’s got a membership group that part of it is on Facebook, but every month you get what’s called a bundle, and there will be a topic that they focus on and this month it is about creating a membership club which isn’t of particular interest to me, but a previous month was on webinars and another month was on creating systems for your business.”


• The Times – newspaper “I read The Times every morning online and there are usually some good articles in that too.”

Books

• Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found by Cheryl Strayed – “There was an article about her this week in The Times anyway, but she wrote the book about the walk that she went on. There was a film made of it earlier this year. Very inspirational.”


• Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There by Cheryl Strayed – “She also did a book that is the answers to questions, sort of agony aunt questions. For a long time she was anonymous, and the way that she answered things was so beautiful because she had real empathy with people that were going through a really hard time, really struggling with some very, very difficult life challenges, and it’s particularly poignant because she’s had a lot of major challenges herself in her life, and yet she was able to share and make people feel better.”


• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens – “I listen to the Christmas Carol, you know an audio version of that while I’m making Christmas cakes and things like that.”

Music

• April Verch – a folk fiddle player “she collects different sorts of music which is brilliant and talked about the fiddle and everything. She plays the fiddle and dances at the same time which is awesome and didn’t fall over which I would have done. She also sings, but she doesn’t sing and play the fiddle at the same time!”

Films & Theatre

• Farinelli and the King by Claire van Kampen– “We’d wanted to go and see it and there were no tickets, and we kept going into the theatre, no tickets. These two turned up at 9:00 in the morning so we bought them. Went there and it was the most fantastic play with music. There were live musicians there. It was beautiful.”

Tips

• Early morning walk – “I get up with my son because he leaves for school at 7:20 , so I’m up and around then. What I’ve started to do in the last three months is go for a walk just to get some energy up, and I will do anything from a two thousand step walk to perhaps a half hour walk which gives me about six thousand steps on my fit watch, which is good.”


• Drinking water – “I also have a five hundred millilitre bottle of tap water as soon as I get up because I’m always dehydrated after sleeping.”


• Time Blocking – “There are times when I do time block. I’ve found that if there’s a proposal I need to do for a client or I’m writing a blog or doing my podcast, or even I’ve been creating some online courses, I will switch my phone to my call minder, switch all of my mobile phones and other devices off and just focus for an hour or so and I need to do that. I’ve even got a timer that if I want to do that for a half an hour then I’ll put that timer on and it will ring after thirty minutes, and I know I’ve focused completely on that task which sounds a little bit strict but it works for me.”


• Prioritising Clients – “He (a speaker at a conference) said that he always answers the phone which is a bit scary when you’re in a conference with him, but we’ll move over from that, but he will always take a call and he will always respond, and if somebody says that they want a quote from something, he will drop everything to make sure that quote goes straightaway. If they email him, he’ll pick up the phone and speak to them, and he says that that is a game changer because people think, “Oh, gosh. This person is really interested in having my work.” Rather procrastinating and thinking, “Oh, well they’re probably at lunch now. Oh, it’s a bit late to phone up. I’ll phone up tomorrow.” By which time he has engaged with the client, and is further on in the process, so I think that was a really, really good message to me and other entrepreneurs that actually the client, and actually getting that work, is the priority.”


• Exercise – “I do exercise. I go to the gym three or four times a week in the winter. In the summer I go swimming in a local lido because I love swimming outdoors and go walking, and I go body boarding when I’m down in Wales at our house down there.


• Have Hobbies – “I do lots of sewing and crafty things and cooking. I love reading. I love going to the cinema and the theatre, all things like that, so lots of things.”


• Learning from Challenges -“When you’re an entrepreneur there are challenges, there are things, and you think that you’ve hit a brick wall, or you have got a very difficult client. I had a very difficult situation that was resolved last week. I will say it was two hours before we presented a windup order to the high courts and finally we were paid. That took a lot of strength. I felt that I grew as a person for it because it would have been very easy to just back down from this bully, and we were completely in the right. That’s clearly a st