Episode 016: Q&A 6

On this episode, I answer the question "What do you recommend doing for contracts? Right now I just have them physically signed."

Quick answer: Get a CRM like Honeybook

I noted in the episode that if you want to grab one of the contract templates on my site, you can get one for 40% through December 4th with code YAYCONTRACTS.

If you get a template and sign-up for Honeybook, you can reach out at my law firm and book a free consultation with me to get your contract setup in your new Honeybook account.

Episode Transcript

Braden: (00:01)
Hello and welcome to episode 16 of the unfuck your best podcast. As always, this is Braden, your host. Super excited that you are joining me today. Just a quick note before we get started. This is my first podcast episode that I'm recording in my home office. I recently decided to move out of my office that we work in into a home office so I could reallocate some of that rent money in towards some other business expenses. I'll be talking about that on one of my profit report podcasts, but I'm letting you know because if you hear some jingling in the background, it's probably one of my three dogs or all three of them running around. Um, I think they're pretty excited to have someone to hang out with all day. And uh, also I don't know how the audio is going to shake out, so I'm actually hoping that the audio will be better.

Braden: (00:52)
Now in my old office, it was all glass, so it's pretty echoey. Hopefully it's improved a little bit, but if it's gone down in quality, I'll certainly see if I can try to figure that out. Okay, so let's dive in. If you are new to the podcast, welcome. This is a Tuesday episode, which means that we are doing a shorter format show each Tuesday. I cover a question that is brought to us through my Facebook group. You can join the group at Braydon's besties on Facebook, B, R, a, D E N. S. how you spell my first name and the way it works is once you join the group, you'll get one of those three question prompts that you have to answer to get in. And the first prompt is for you to share with me a legal or tax question that you have in your business. So I get questions on LLCs, contracts, trademark sales, tax and income tax, retirement planning, you name it.

Braden: (01:47)
I do not cover all of those areas, but the areas that I do cover and do have expertise on, I take those questions and I answer them each Tuesday. One question, the topics that are kind of outside of my wheelhouse, I save for when we have guests experts and we tackle them that. So make sure you join the Facebook group. If you would like to ask a question to potentially be answered on the podcast. The question we will be covering today is what do you recommend for contracts? Right now? I just have them physically signed, so great question. This individual is sounds like basically they actually send their contract with their clients via email. The client prints it, signs it, scans it and send it, sends it back. That is an old school approach to doing it. It's probably the least. If Lily's deficient way you can get your contract signed so I don't recommend it.

Braden: (02:46)
Uh, it is perfectly legal. There's no reason why you can't do it that way. But for my experience, I actually did this when I first started out and it takes a lot more time to get your clients onboarded and typically for sales and marketing reasons, you want to get them on the contract, signing on the dotted line and paying your invoice right away while they are still eager and excited to work with you. Also like a lot of us want to go paperless now. We don't want to be managing paper contracts so I highly recommend using a CRM that stands for customer relationship management program. There are lots out there specifically even for creatives and online business owners. Some of the biggest ones are dub Sato and HoneyBook. Those are probably the biggest two. I used UB Sato for over a year. I loved it. Um, I think it's a great program.

Braden: (03:38)
Really nothing bad to say about it. I now use a HoneyBook and am also a HoneyBook affiliate, so I recommend HoneyBook now as well and have an affiliate link for HoneyBook so that you can get a discount starting out. Some other options are, I've heard of Tava bonds I think is one aisle planner, which is more specifically for wedding planners. 17 hats is another big one. But while all of these tools do is they allow you to collect leads. So you can have a lead collection for one your website and then you can go in a once a day or once a week and check all of the leads that you've had come in and follow up with them. You can take notes inside of that client, um, project. So you can take notes when you do your initial call with him on your back and forth, the emails, all that kind of stuff.

Braden: (04:30)
You can set up workflows which are basically like magic. So those are automations. So you can have it automatically create tasks for, you send emails, you can create canned emails just like you can in your email platform. But it's nice because you can design them a little bit better in CRMs. And then you can also make proposals and contracts, which is why we're talking about it on this podcast. Why I really love CRMs is because especially with HoneyBook, you can make a proposal that shows the invoice with the itemized lines on there, which is really great for sales tax purposes, which I'll be talking more about and a few weeks and then you can have the total price and the proposal. They look at that, they like it, they scroll down and then they see the contract and then they sign the contract and it's all in one.

Braden: (05:21)
So you can send that all in one email, they sign it, then you get an email notification and you can sign it. They've already paid. You sign the contract, you're ready to rock and roll. It's a super good user experience as well. So my first time actually a client of a brand photographer, I went um, to that photographer and they, okay, we're using HoneyBook. I apologize. This something wonky just happened with my audio. It looks like my podcast might came and plugged, but we should be good now. So I was just saying that my time interacting with HoneyBook was as a client and I said, this is really awesome. It was really easy for me to sign your contract. What are you using? She shared that with me and then I started looking into it on my own. So that's pretty much all I have today.

Braden: (06:12)
I do want to let you all know that for just about the next week I am running a promotion and the spirit of black Friday, you know everyone's all about the promotions right now on my contract templates on the website you can use the code, yay contracts for 40% off all of my contract templates. I have um, floral design contracts, portrait photography, wedding photography, um, marketing, social media management and several others. You can get on there and use that promo code for 40% off. And if you want to try out HoneyBook, I believe you get 30 days for free. You can go to the show notes, you use my referral code and if you grab a template and sign up for HoneyBook, then you can also book a three, a free 30 minute phone call with me where I will help you actually integrate your contract and to HoneyBook and get all set up.

Braden: (07:07)
And also answer any one on one questions that you might have. So check that out. Let me know if you have any questions. You can find the show notes at unfuck, your biz.com forward slash episode forward slash 16 if you don't remember all of that, just go to unfuck, your biz.com it's really easy to navigate to the episodes. Let me know if you have any questions. Join the Facebook group, leave a question there, shoot me a DM, and as always, I would love for you to leave a review and subscribe to the podcast. A review is really the easiest way to say thank you. If you're enjoying all the tips on the episodes, and I hope to be back in your ear buds on Thursday. Yes, I know that is Thanksgiving and we've are still going to have an episode, so if you're subscribed and you won't be on your phone on Thursday, then it will still be there for you on Monday when you're back in work mode. So do that. Thanks again for tuning in and I hope that you have a fantastic week and weekend.