Hey friends, before we start the show, I want to invite you to check out my brand new free training all about how you can start your own freelance business from home. In this completely free one-hour training, I'm going to share with you exactly how I was able to leave my full-time teaching job and replace my income by freelancing and how you can do the same thing too. We're gonna talk about how you can find skills that you already have and what services you can offer as well as what you need to actually get started today. So you can go check out my brand new free training.
It's my gift to you at aubriemalek.com/FreeTraining. That's AubrieMalek.com/FreeTraining and we will link that up in the show notes for you. All right, now let's go ahead and dive on into the show. Hey friends, I'm so excited to have you back here today because we are going to be talking about the onboarding process.
What is the process like to bring new clients on if you don't have one? Why is it important to have one? Why you need to have one? And then what can that process look like for you?
That's what we're going to dive into today. But if you're listening to this episode and you've been loving what you've been hearing on the podcast, you've been thinking about starting your business, but you haven't made the plunge yet because you're worried, you're nervous, you're scared. I want to let you know that we are enrolling very shortly for the next round of the VA prep accelerator. We just finished up our first round of it and the results that these women got inside of the program were incredible.
Clients before the program was even done having that success, having that hand-holding that guidance, being able to have their questions answered. It was amazing. And so if you are thinking, I want to start a business, but I'm just not sure if I can do it on my own. Then the VA prep accelerator is going to be for you because it's an intensive six week program group coaching program where we work through each step of the prep framework together.
So if you're someone who's been eyeing the prep, but you're nervous about it being self-study and worried if you would see results because you're doing it on your own and you want the coaching and the accountability that you would love to see, then the VA prep accelerator is for you. We are opening up the waitlist right now. So if you go to AubrieMalek.com slash join dash accelerator, I will put that in the show notes for you. So you don't have to try to type that in.
Just go click the link in the show notes there, AubrieMalek.com slash join dash accelerator. You will get added to the waitlist so that when we officially open the doors and start adding people to the program, you can be the first to know. And by being on the waitlist, you are actually going to get a $200 off coupon if you enroll within the first 48 hours. So get your butt on the waitlist so that you can know exactly when it opens up.
You can grab that $200 off coupon, which is an incredible, incredible steal. And you can join us inside where we will work together super closely for the next six weeks going over how to start your business, figuring out your services, getting your portfolio ready, getting you marketing and getting those clients. So go to AubrieMalek.com slash join accelerator, join dash accelerator. And like I said, that link will be in the show notes for you.
Go jump on the waitlist. You'll get an email with lots of fun information about what's all included going into more of that nitty gritty. And then like I said, when we officially open the doors back up, you will get that super amazing bonus. All right, let's go ahead and dive on into the episode.
Welcome to the freelancer to CEO podcast. This is a podcast for overlong freelancers who are ready to simplify and scale their business so they can earn more and stress less. I'm your host, Aubrey Malek, and I'm a former elementary teacher who launched my own freelancing business. And now I want to share all my secrets with you.
Each week, I will be sharing business strategy systems and tactical tips that you can take into your business today. You can finally step into that CEO role you desire. Let's dive on into the show. All right, so let's talk about this whole onboarding process.
What I want you to remember about the onboarding process, and this is what I truly believe, is onboarding a client actually starts before a client does all the pain of the invoices and signing the contracts. It's really about that first impression of you when they first find out about you. How can they work through that process in a seamless manner where they can get on a call with you? We'll get into all the nitty-gritty here.
But it's really important to have an onboarding process if you don't already have one. And a few reasons why is it's going to put your clients at ease to know that if they want to take that next step with you, that there's a process in place for you where they're not going to have to wait weeks upon weeks to even hear back from you to find the right link. We want to put our clients at ease knowing that when they're hiring out that they're getting well taken care of. The second reason why it's important to have an onboarding process is it shows your clients that you know what you're doing, that you have put some thought into what it's going to look like bringing a new client on.
And again, that goes back to putting them at ease. And then number three, it helps your business grow as you grow. So right now you might be in a place where you don't have any clients and it's easy for you to do the emailing back and forth, to type up every email, to send the scheduling link directly through an email. Right now it doesn't feel like it's that much work.
And you're probably thinking, okay, I can handle this. But as your business grows and as you want your business to grow and scale, you need to have a system in place and a process in place so that the client can move from one step to the next without you having to be the one that's manually doing all of that work. So that's why it's really important to have a client onboarding process. It should be thorough.
It should be thought out. There's so many benefits to it, not just to your clients, but to you having those systems in place. And when I was first getting started, I really didn't have a process in place. I was very much like I'll fly by the seat of my pants and figure this out.
And I kind of just jumped right in and started bringing on new clients. And that was fine for the beginning. But then things started getting lost and things started getting dropped. And I forgot to respond to emails.
And it just wasn't the best look for me. I don't want that for you. Of course, I recovered from that. I learned from my mistakes.
I've gone the path and taken the road less traveled for you so that I can kind of figure all this stuff out. And luckily for me, like I said, my clients were super gracious and they knew that like I was just running my business. But in this time of growing my business and as I've grown, like I perfected that onboarding process, but I've learned how important it is to actually have a process and system in place for this to know exactly what it's going to look like to bring new clients to the door, having everything in place, ready to go. And then once you have a really good process in place, the best thing is going to be that you can just copy and paste it moving forward with every client.
Some minor things might need to be tweaked, but the main meat and potatoes of your onboarding process will be able to be copy and pasted over and over again. It makes it super, super seamless and stress, less stressful for you because a system helps us to not get overwhelmed and it just needs to be able to be duplicated. So if you don't want to feel that constant overwhelm every time thinking about bringing on a new client, oh my gosh, it's gonna be so much work bringing on a new client. If you haven't taken the time to put a process in place and you're feeling that overwhelmed, that's why it's really important for today's episode to really figure out, okay, what does that process look like?
What do I need to do? So I want you to think about the onboarding process from the very beginning. So there's some steps that you're going to need to write down. So if you have a paper and pen, words are hard for me today.
If you have paper and pen ready to go, um, start to write down what some of these steps are in the onboarding process. So the very first step is going to be where do clients find out about you? So that could be from a website. If you have it, that could be from your Facebook page, Instagram.
Um, if you're cold pitching through that email, so where do clients find out about you? That's the first thing you really need to think about. Um, you need to have a place where they can learn more about you. And I encourage it to be in some kind of digital format.
Maybe you are doing local networking and you have a business card and they can kind of take that next step with you. But really think about what is that central location of where people can find out about me and find out about what I do from there. The next step needs to be booking the call. So if they look over all the information that you have and they're thinking, wow, I think this person really can help me out.
How can I take that next step? I'll tell you that clients do not want to have to jump through hoops to try to get that call booked, to try to take that next step with you. Trust me from someone who's been on the opposite Then following up with the proposal and having a system in place that makes sending the proposal super easy. Again, we're not like recreating this, you know, proposal, which takes a ton of time.
I want, I don't want you to have to spend a ton of time creating a proposal. I want you to have things easily loaded into the system that you use, whatever that might be, and being able to send that proposal off super easily. And then if you use something like Dubsado or HoneyBook, having automations where they can automatically move to the next step, which is that invoice and contract stuff. And then if you can have an automation too, or even just a template where you can send that welcome email with the kickoff call link, having even that template ready to go so it's easily copied and pasted, that will save you a ton of time.
So what I want you to do is I want you to, you've taken the notes on this, you know what that process is, and then I want you to kind of walk yourself through this process. How does that feel? If someone were to go from start to finish, could they do this easily? Do you have all the pieces in place?
And take some time with this. Like, even if you're saying, oh, I've already worked with clients and I don't have an onboarding process, there's no better time to start than right now. Don't feel like if you haven't been doing this for the last six months or however long you've been in business that, oh, you know, I can't do this now. You can definitely do this.
And like I said, there's a lot of really great programs that you can use to help you with this onboarding process. But I want you to think about it from start to finish and think about, even before the client actually becomes a client, how can they move from one step to the next? And that's really going to give you a super high-end client experience. It's going to put your clients at ease.
It's going to put you at ease. It's going to allow your business to move seamlessly in the background without you. Or like I said, even just having some of these pieces in place so it's easy to, for you to make that next step to, for you to go from one step to the next with clients too. So I hope this was helpful.
I hope that it starts to get your wheels turning about putting that onboarding process in place so that you have everything ready to go and your clients can feel super taken care of. It's like staying at a five-star hotel. I always like to think about that as like the client experience. Like you want your clients to feel like once they really start working with you, like, wow, like you've taken really great care of them and they just feel like you can hit the ground running.
And it really starts with that first impression of how can I, you know, take those next couple of steps with you and work through this onboarding process. So I hope you enjoyed it. I hope it was helpful. If you are loving this podcast, make sure that you hit subscribe.
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And finally, if you want to connect with other freelancers, if you want more support, if you want a place where you can feel like you can ask questions and grow and learn with other like-minded people, please don't hesitate to jump into a free community at AubreyMalek.com slash community. Just answer three quick questions. I just like to make sure that we are not having any spam or robot accounts in our group. I want to keep it a safe place.
And then I also like to send you an email with a free gift from me to help your business grow too. So I hope that you will join us over there. And like I said, I hope this episode was helpful. I hope you're having a wonderful week.
I can't wait to connect with you on the next episode and I will talk to you soon. Thank you for choosing to spend some time with me today. I appreciate you so much. If you haven't yet, I would love it if you would leave me a review on iTunes and share this episode in your Instagram stories and tag me.
By sharing and reviewing, you can help spread the message so we can reach more entrepreneurs who are ready to scale their business to new heights. I will see you in the next episode.