Are you a freestyle supermarket shopper or do you stay glued to a list?
With an excessively fussy family to feed, I mainly use a list. It’s collated from the latest items on the kitchen whiteboard plus a quick look over our master food list. But I’m also a grown up, and I love an interesting supermarket buy. I’ll buy a fancy quiche if I want to, even if my kids won’t touch it and it’s not on the list.
Plus, my soul-feeding dark chocolate digestive biscuits have a funny way of sneaking into the basket.
In other words, I take my grand template, tailor it with the needs at the time, then add a dash of ‘because I feel like it’.
Now you might think your 1 to 1 service has nothing to do with shopping lists, but hear me out…
Your clients come to you for a tailored service for their specific problem. They want your skills to improve their individual situation, because they recognise that a one-size-fits-all product or course isn’t going to work for them.
But that doesn’t mean that everything about your service has to be bespoke.
I’m all for flexibility to help a client, but you can drive yourself round the bend getting hung up on creating something bespoke for every client.
Templates make sure you don’t forget the essentials for clients, e.g. you always need to ask your clients these 5 questions (just like we always need bread).
While tailoring makes your service work for each client, e.g. your client has the required data to hand and can skip past the handholding to find it (oh look, we’re out of rice this week).
Plus, it’s your business, so when your dark chocolate digestive of a client comes along, you can change anything you want, simply because you feel like it.
Having templates (or shopping lists) in the first place just makes it easier to tailor, or go comfortably off-piste when you want to.
My clients come to me precisely because the one-size-fits-all approach of copying systems and software from other businesses hasn’t worked for them.
Or they’ve created their own client management system from scratch, but it’s become a bit of a monster to manage on a daily basis.
However, so I don’t get overwhelmed meeting the differing needs of each client, I have a standard:
- set of questions to assess if I can help them
- booking form
- consultation process to make sure we cover every area
- process to figure out a plan to meet their needs
- template to write up their plan
- template to create their streamlined workflow.
With these in place, I know where I’m starting and I can tailor them as I see fit.
And these are examples of other templates my clients have created:
- templates for proposals and quotes
- templates for onboarding emails or briefing forms
- report frameworks
- email folder systems for clients
- ‘working with me’ documents
- and even templates to celebrate clients’ achievements and ask for testimonials.
I hope I’ve convinced you that it’s worth finding the common threads in your service and using them to create templates as a starting point. Or maybe I’ve just sent you on a chocolate biscuit hunt.
If you’re not sure where to start finding those common threads, get in touch and see how I can help you.
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