[00:00:00] Monica Froese: Welcome to the Empowered Business Podcast, where strategy needs action. I’m Monica froze, and I’m here to help you create, sell, and scale digital products the smart way, using AI and proven strategies to build a sustainable, profitable business. If you’re ready to turn your expertise into digital products that sell and eventually grow into a thriving digital shop, you are in the right place.
[00:00:23] Monica Froese: Each week I break down real world tactics, unfiltered insights, and bold business moves. Because building a digital product business should be sustainable, scalable, and designed for long-term success. Let’s ditch the fluff, leverage AI to work smarter and turn your expertise into a thriving digital empire on your terms.
[00:00:42] Monica Froese: Let’s get started.
[00:00:47] Monica Froese: Today I have a different kind of episode for you. Today I’m talking to Sean Lemon, who runs the Digital Organizer, and today’s conversation is all about getting organized in your business. [00:01:00] I have been doing this for 12 years and because I came into this, having been in corporate for a long time, I tend to be very organized and I’m also pretty Type A and at Hurt, I think I’m a project manager, so people have commented to me over the years that my business is incredibly organized on the backend.
[00:01:19] Monica Froese: I know that is not common for a lot of people who are listening to this podcast because a lot of people who start their online business got into it as a creative, and before they know it, they’re running this business and all of the systems that they need to keep themselves organized. They just don’t know how to do it.
[00:01:37] Monica Froese: And that’s where Sean comes in. That’s what his entire business is about. He is going to share some really cool practical tips with us on how you can get your business organized and also he shares some pretty cool tools that even I’m going to check out and try. So Sean is the founder of the Digital organizer and has spent the last 17 years helping individuals and businesses get better at using their [00:02:00] technology.
[00:02:00] Monica Froese: A teacher at heart, Sean believes the biggest reason people struggle with their tech is because a lack of understanding of the tools. Isn’t surprising because they’re constantly changing as technology advances. Hello, ai. When not helping businesses operate more efficiently, Sean loves making pottery, riding motorcycles, and spending time with his wife, Madeline, and their three-year-old son, Nico.
[00:02:21] Monica Froese: So let’s dive in and listen to what Sean has to share with us so that we can get our businesses better organized and running more efficiently. Sean, welcome to the Empowered Business Podcast. I’m so excited you agreed to come on here and share all of your insights with us today.
[00:02:38] Shawn Lemon: Thanks for having me.
[00:02:39] Shawn Lemon: I’m excited to just have this conversation ’cause it’s definitely near and dear to my heart.
[00:02:44] Monica Froese: Yes, the organized machine that I am, I’m a very type A person and so people always comment that my business is very organized on the back end. I’ve learned that most people’s is not, so this is like the problem that you solve.
[00:02:56] Monica Froese: Before we jump into what you solve and how you can help people, I [00:03:00] always like to ask people to tell us a little bit about themselves and also your business journey.
[00:03:05] Shawn Lemon: Yeah. So my name is Sean Lemon and I’m the founder of the Digital Organizer and I live in the Nashville, Tennessee area. I’ve got a wife and a three-year-old and.
[00:03:16] Shawn Lemon: I work out of the house. I’ve been doing this business for 11 years. I had a little side hustle that built up to this over the course of five to six years, and that was actually birthed out of the Apple store. So I got ended up at the Apple store because I was in video production. I got a really nice mac and monitor and I had time, ’cause I was a video intern at the time.
[00:03:40] Shawn Lemon: So I just started reading the help menus and learning all of this stuff and then my friends would ask me about it and I started teaching them. And then I had an encounter at the Apple store. I was overhearing a conversation from the genius answering someone’s question about iPhoto and it was wrong.
[00:03:59] Shawn Lemon: Thinking, [00:04:00] oh, these guys aren’t actually getting trained on the software. They don’t know how it works. He’s trained how to troubleshoot the hardware, but he doesn’t know software. I was like, huh, I wonder if I could work there. So I ended up getting a job for the iPhone launch. I. So I was there for all the major iPhone launches and it was a lot of fun, and they ended up pulling me into the training team because that’s just what I do.
[00:04:22] Shawn Lemon: I spent six years, almost seven years, training people on how to use Apple software. They’d buy these new computers and they’d come in and I’d sit down and teach ’em how it works. But I saw so many people who were really overwhelmed by the mess. It was difficult to learn the tool because of all of the mess, and they really couldn’t focus because there were too many problems that needed to be solved before they could get to work on it.
[00:04:49] Shawn Lemon: And so there are plenty of people who can bull right through that, but there are still lots who cannot. And I started trying to help them within the framework of the Apple store’s one [00:05:00] hour sessions. And that would randomly assign based on availability and it just was not working. So I started this and I’ve been doing it for 11 years now.
[00:05:10] Monica Froese: Okay. So what is like the core thing that your business solves? The digital
[00:05:16] Shawn Lemon: disorganization in the four core areas that we work in every single day. So in our business, we have to communicate. We have to get stuff done and store it somewhere. So that’s our filing system. And then we have to keep track of what we’re trying to do, and that’s project management.
[00:05:35] Shawn Lemon: And then all throughout the day, we have to use passwords. Then you are really set up for success and you can pull in another tool if you want to, and realize I’m using it just for this one thing and I don’t need all of the rest because I got my bases covered. I know exactly where I’m gonna go to communicate, where to find my stuff, and I can find it within a couple of clicks and I know what I’m supposed to be [00:06:00] working on.
[00:06:01] Monica Froese: So essentially you help other businesses get organized and come up, not just organize it once. So where do you start with clients? Is it usually like with their files, you have to get your files in order? What’s the thing that most people struggle with when they come to you?
[00:06:15] Shawn Lemon: Most people struggle with all of it, but the starting place is typically email.
[00:06:20] Shawn Lemon: That’s because we want to start with the thing that’s gonna give you the most mental energy back and just leverage all throughout the day. So that’s gonna be time, mental energy, and clarity. And when we are just being hammered with emails and feeling like we have to keep responding and basically we’re reacting all day, then that’s not good energy to get deep, important work done.
[00:06:46] Shawn Lemon: And so if we can tackle that first. Calm the storm. Feel like we’ve got communication under control, then we can move on to the next thing, which is usually files.
[00:06:56] Monica Froese: Okay. I have some selfish questions to ask about [00:07:00] email management.
[00:07:01] Shawn Lemon: Go for it.
[00:07:02] Monica Froese: I used to get my work email down. I. Zero inbox, whatever they call it.
[00:07:07] Monica Froese: And a big way I did that was all the things I signed up for. I had a separate Gmail, so like when I signed up for someone’s email list. Mm-hmm. And then I got lazy with it and now my work email feels like it’s out of control. Yeah. And I am not one that likes missing things. I very rarely miss things, but I find myself missing things more often.
[00:07:25] Monica Froese: So what are your top tips for staying organized other than don’t sign up with your work email
[00:07:31] Shawn Lemon: to all
[00:07:31] Monica Froese: lists.
[00:07:32] Shawn Lemon: I would say be ruthless about the lists. Unsubscribe from a lot of ’em, and if you find that you miss them, then you can go back and find ’em again and sign back up again. But we typically want to filter that stuff outta the inbox so it just doesn’t hit it in the first place, I think, at least since the start of this business called SaneBox.
[00:07:51] Shawn Lemon: So I pay a hundred bucks a year for this. It filters all of my email for, it takes my newsletters that I actually want and it puts [00:08:00] them in my later folder. Now I’ve got a financial folder and that pulls in any receipts, shipping, notifications, anything to do with money that I want to see, but I don’t need to see immediately and I wanna see it separate.
[00:08:14] Shawn Lemon: So I never clear that out. That’s just a running list of thousands of emails. Then my later folder are just a couple of things that I read, and then I read ’em and either delete ’em or archive and my inbox is there for people.
[00:08:28] Monica Froese: It’s called inbox
[00:08:30] Shawn Lemon: SaneBox, like emails making you insane. And so this is gonna make it sane against.
[00:08:35] Monica Froese: Are there any other tools that you use on the regular to manage your email?
[00:08:39] Shawn Lemon: Yes, I use an app called Missive. Right now I’ve used a number of different ones and I often recommend Spark, but I’m using missive right now because it is a combination of a ticketing system and an email client, so I can communicate with my team without emailing, so I can share an email that I get from a client [00:09:00] and we can have a sort of text conversation.
[00:09:03] Shawn Lemon: In between all of the messages, so none of our internal conversation has to actually go through an email, and so we never pollute the string and have to try and keep up with it with our own internal conversation. We can assign tasks, assign emails to others, and then we can use AI filters as well, which I’m just now starting to use.
[00:09:22] Shawn Lemon: So I’ve connected it with my chat GBT account via the API, and so it can analyze all of my conversations and then it can sort them for me. It’s not all that great. So I’m still using Sandbox and I’ve dialed it back, and so I’m figuring out just like little laser things that I want it to find. So pull out all of the cold pitches for me and just pull that aside automatically.
[00:09:46] Shawn Lemon: And then I’m gonna set up another one for my support account to say, if it looks like this, assign it to me. Otherwise assign it to Ryan.
[00:09:57] Monica Froese: Okay. Now, do your clients adopt [00:10:00] these apps?
[00:10:01] Shawn Lemon: Yeah. Yeah, so we set up a lot of clients with missive, either for small teams or for individuals who are working with an assistant, because this way you can share back and forth.
[00:10:11] Shawn Lemon: It’s an easy way to give someone access to your inbox without giving them your password, and then they have access to everything in your account. So it’s a good solution for that. There’s other solutions to get around that as well, but this is a good one for it. It’s really, if you got a lot of email going on and you have multiple people who need to be involved in this, then it’s a great tool.
[00:10:36] Shawn Lemon: Spark is another good one for it.
[00:10:38] Monica Froese: Do you use Google? Google Workspace or Microsoft Office?
[00:10:42] Shawn Lemon: Google Workspace.
[00:10:43] Monica Froese: Okay. That’s what we use too, and I think most of the people who are listening probably use Google Workspace. A couple questions around that. Is that the majority of your clients as well?
[00:10:51] Shawn Lemon: The majority, just because we talk about it more, but we have plenty of people in the Microsoft space and even self-hosted and other situations [00:11:00] as well.
[00:11:00] Monica Froese: Do you find Google’s easier to work with than Microsoft?
[00:11:02] Shawn Lemon: Yes, without a doubt. And easier and cheaper to administrate. Yeah. So you know, if you need to do something yourself, like you can, it’s not that hard. And then their support is available immediately, so it’s so easy to get support.
[00:11:18] Monica Froese: Do you use the built-in filters or labels inside of Google Workspace?
[00:11:23] Shawn Lemon: Uh, for Gmail, no. It’s because I have SaneBox already doing it. If I only used one account and I didn’t have any anyone else involved in email, then I could totally train it to just keep promotions and one place updates would be where all of my financial stuff would go, and I would turn everything else off.
[00:11:41] Shawn Lemon: Financial, like any of the stuff that I need. And then promos would be the newsletters that I actually want. And then I always have the habit of unsubscribing from new things that I’ve added, or if someone has re-added me to their list.
[00:11:54] Monica Froese: So I, I feel like you just solved a big problem for me and in an attempt to not have everything come to [00:12:00] my inbox, I got a help at, and then a hello at, and I divide like help at was for our clients and students.
[00:12:05] Monica Froese: So if they’re responding to, I can’t log in or whatever it is. Hello at is where all of our promo emails went out from. So if you’re responding to those, I actually in Gmail had it. Still filter into my main inbox, uhhuh, so I could have a pulse on what was going on. Yeah. But now, of course, I don’t really touch help at or hello at myself anymore, and the emails are still all coming to me and I’m, I get overwhelmed by them.
[00:12:26] Monica Froese: But then I’m also afraid of missing something. Mm-hmm. That maybe my team doesn’t know I need to see and I do need to see. So I’m wondering if I could turn off all of them filtering to me and just use this solution.
[00:12:36] Shawn Lemon: Totally. Yeah. Yeah. So because it’s an email client, and client is just an app that will pull in.
[00:12:43] Shawn Lemon: Other email accounts for you so that you can see it all in one place. That’s Outlook, and you can just set them up. So you can have private inboxes and you can share emails from each of your private inboxes. And you can also have shared inboxes and, and choose who gets access to that shared inbox [00:13:00] and to what level.
[00:13:01] Monica Froese: That’s amazing. That okay? That’s
[00:13:03] Shawn Lemon: right. Yeah, so definitely check it out. It’s a little on the expensive side at $30 a month per account or per user. But it’s a really good tool, especially if you want to incorporate some AI stuff into it. Really great. It’s much more professional. If you want to get started with something like this and aren’t willing to spend the money, spark is the better alternative to get started.
[00:13:26] Monica Froese: Let’s move into file management because this is probably the thing I hear the most from people that follow me. Mm-hmm. They can’t, they’re so disorganized, they can’t find anything, and people are always coming in. When I get contractors and stuff, they come in and tell me that I am super organized and they’re surprised that they can find stuff.
[00:13:43] Monica Froese: So
[00:13:43] Shawn Lemon: yeah.
[00:13:44] Monica Froese: Where do you teach people to organize their files? Can we start there?
[00:13:47] Shawn Lemon: Yeah. It’s whichever file provider. You like best, and that really makes the most sense for you. That’s where you should consolidate everything. That should be your primary [00:14:00] filing system. And it doesn’t mean that we don’t keep the others.
[00:14:04] Shawn Lemon: You might choose Dropbox for all of your storage in your main filing system, but you collaborate with people in Google Docs. We want to treat other accounts that are not our primary like mailboxes. We don’t store stuff in the mailbox. We’re putting stuff there, we’re retrieving it there, but the things that we need to keep end up getting stored in our filing cabinet.
[00:14:29] Monica Froese: Oh, you use Google Drive primarily? I
[00:14:31] Shawn Lemon: do. I do. And then I’ve got all of the others, basically. But they’re all free accounts. Thanks. Don’t pay for any of the others.
[00:14:37] Monica Froese: Do you recommend using the shared drives? ’cause that’s pretty much how we standardize Google Drives. Even for my work email. On my personal side of life, I do.
[00:14:45] Monica Froese: But on the business side, like my main Google Drive folder, uh, really never touch everything is. That I touch is almost always in a shared drive.
[00:14:53] Shawn Lemon: Yeah.
[00:14:54] Monica Froese: We’re broken down by marketing management. Mm-hmm. All that. Is this kind of the drive or exactly the same. [00:15:00] Yeah. Okay.
[00:15:00] Shawn Lemon: So shared drives is definitely the way to go.
[00:15:03] Shawn Lemon: Now, just for understanding your audience, have you talked about shared drives and why it’s important to use those?
[00:15:10] Monica Froese: I have not. So please.
[00:15:11] Shawn Lemon: Okay. So you guys need to understand that when these cloud file providers started, it was for consumers. Consumers mean that everyone owns their own stuff. That means if I have a folder that I wanna share with Monica, I’m gonna share that folder with her in any file that she puts in my folder she owns, she put the file in my folder, but she’s the owner of it.
[00:15:40] Shawn Lemon: And so ownership stays with her. So if she’s a contractor for me, say she’s my social media manager and she’s creating all of these posts and putting them in my folder. We end the contract and I’m taking this in-house and she ends up shutting down her account and she deletes her Google account. It deletes [00:16:00] all of the files that she created for me from my folder I.
[00:16:04] Monica Froese: The reason I adopted shared drives was ’cause that’s how we did it in corporate, and I just continued that logic over into business. Yes,
[00:16:11] Shawn Lemon: email does not have access or [email protected]. Account doesn’t have access to shared drives natively unless a Google Workspace account shares something with you or shares a shared drive with you.
[00:16:23] Shawn Lemon: And then you can see it, but still you can’t create them. So that’s why Google Workspace is important, or Dropbox for business is important because then you get the team folders and the team folders mean that the data that gets put in that folder is owned by the organization who’s hosting everything, not by individual people.
[00:16:42] Shawn Lemon: It’s extremely important, and most people don’t. You have to migrate all of your stuff from MyDrive into shared drives or from your individual Dropbox folders into team folders to really collaborate well and make sure that you own all of your stuff.
[00:16:58] Monica Froese: Okay. Good to know. Now, do you [00:17:00] use any tools with Google Drive or Dropbox that helps organize these files?
[00:17:07] Shawn Lemon: Nope.
[00:17:08] Monica Froese: It’s just Okay. It’s
[00:17:09] Shawn Lemon: just straight. No, at this point, because they. Dropbox has the best thing, which would be like, it can rename files for you that like you can set a protocol and when clients upload files in there, it can change the name for you based on the convention that you set. So that’s pretty cool.
[00:17:27] Shawn Lemon: Anyone uses AI realizes that this thing is not polished and we’re making it work. It’s really cool what it can do, but it is not perfect and the integration with file sucks. So it can tell you like what’s in this folder. But then you really can’t trust its accuracy with even a lot of math without advanced parameters.
[00:17:46] Shawn Lemon: It’s about a system and in the end. How we approach this makes it actually really easy because the reality is the 80 20 rule applies, but an even greater ratio, how much files we’re actually [00:18:00] using that we have stored is probably in the single percent. We really wanna prioritize for that, and we’re heavy on archiving, and so we’re restructuring and having you pull everything together, realize what’s not relevant.
[00:18:12] Shawn Lemon: Today and going forward, moving that aside, and we’re gonna put those in buckets, but we’re not gonna spend as much time organizing that as we do our main filing system and then setting that up based on how your business runs. The Japanese have this system for running their factories, especially like any of their manufacturing cars, motorcycles and stuff.
[00:18:35] Shawn Lemon: And it started this. The whole idea is to make it as efficient as possible so that someone who has a specific function in that workshop or in that factory, they have everything that they need right within reach of them so they can just grab anything that they need. All of the tools, all of the materials that they need are right there so that they’re not having to go out all [00:19:00] over the place.
[00:19:00] Shawn Lemon: And so it’s laid out really efficiently. And that’s the idea that we want to organize our files by. And inside of marketing, I’ve got a social media folder, and so everything, the whole process is actually in that folder. So social media is shared with my social media guy, and so we have some resources for him, but inside of that are posts and at the top level are things that I need to see and approve.
[00:19:27] Shawn Lemon: And then there’s another folder in there called approved. So all I do is go to the social folder or go to the post folder, look at the posts, move them into approved, and send ’em an email and say, done. If you’ve got a highly collaborative team, you really have to think about what is it that everyone needs access to and how can we make that happen?
[00:19:49] Shawn Lemon: And shortcuts is a really big part of that too.
[00:19:52] Monica Froese: Okay. Do you use the desktop app or do you use the in browser. Okay.
[00:19:57] Shawn Lemon: I use both.
[00:19:58] Monica Froese: Okay. I actually don’t [00:20:00] use the desktop app anymore. Mm-hmm. I used just Go, and I don’t really know why I got out of, I think it may have been having sync issues like this is a long time ago and I just got annoyed and didn’t go back to it, and now I only use the browser one.
[00:20:11] Monica Froese: Is there Advantage one, like why do you use the browser sometimes in the app? Sometimes.
[00:20:17] Shawn Lemon: Okay. So 90%, 95% of my job is typically happening in docs and spreadsheets when I’m in Google Drive. But when someone signs a contract to start working with me, I get an email about it. I click the the link in the email to download the PDF Audit Trail.
[00:20:38] Shawn Lemon: So it’s the entire contract with all of the good details about it. And so I have a folder for clients and inside of clients is a folder called Monica. So I want that contract to go in that folder. So in my web browser, I set my preferences to say, when I wanna download something, ask me where to [00:21:00] put it. I don’t want my downloads going to a random folder or even to a dedicated folder, because I have to empty that out.
[00:21:09] Shawn Lemon: I don’t wanna manage files. I don’t want things to just disappear on me that then I have to clean up later when I’m actually looking for something. So my browser is set to ask me where to go. And because I use Google Drive, I need the app installed so that I can put the contract right in your folder when I download it, and I don’t have to organize anything.
[00:21:31] Shawn Lemon: Oh, and I’m renaming it right in the process so it gets the perfect name. It’s put in the perfect spot that’s accessible to me within three clicks.
[00:21:41] Monica Froese: So while my Google Drive is very organized, I just have a main downloads folder. Mm-hmm. And actually I use the iCloud to sync it, so it goes across all of my Apple devices on my laptop, working sometimes.
[00:21:52] Monica Froese: It’s not organized. Mm-hmm. And so I’m often having to go back to Google. I have to download whatever picture I need for whatever [00:22:00] I’m working on. ’cause I cannot find it in the download folder. It wastes a lot of time.
[00:22:04] Shawn Lemon: So my desktop two things on it right now. Sometimes there’s more, because it’s a desktop, it’s okay to put things on the desktop while we’re working on them.
[00:22:14] Shawn Lemon: It’s easy access. But I have two things that always stay there. Upload to searchy. Searchy is the place where I have this resource library where I upload all of my stuff. This is where we sell this to. You guys could buy it or we give it to our clients who are working with us one-on-one. So I’ve got this folder and I always wanna keep my raw material because I might wanna leave Searchy.
[00:22:35] Shawn Lemon: That folder is a little bit buried. It’s probably like four clicks away, and I don’t wanna save every single file in there. So I have a shortcut. To that folder right on my desktop. So when I download the video, I just download it directly to upload a search sheet, make sure it’s named properly, and then upload it.
[00:22:54] Shawn Lemon: And then the other one is shared drives. And so that way I can quickly get to finance [00:23:00] anywhere. And usually I’m uploading contracts and I’m uploading media. Otherwise I’m using Google Docs and Sheets. So I’ve got specific. Shortcuts in my sidebar for the things that I always do, which would just be the expenses clients, just the main share drives in case I need to view it there.
[00:23:21] Shawn Lemon: But then in my web browser, I’ve got probably 15 different shortcuts to different places in Google Drive so that it’s available within a single click.
[00:23:30] Monica Froese: Okay. So I have most of that down, but that little tip of a having it ask me where. To put it when it downloads instead of just going to that main download.
[00:23:40] Monica Froese: Yeah. That I have. It’s genius. And I think I’m gonna try the desktop app again because
[00:23:44] Shawn Lemon: yeah, I,
[00:23:45] Monica Froese: I think I waste too much time.
[00:23:48] Shawn Lemon: And then if you have a big media file that you’re trying to upload in through the browser, you can’t close that window. Or it stops the upload and then it doesn’t work. Whereas if we have a big file [00:24:00] that we’re just dragging into a folder on our computer, that’s going to sync to Google Drive automatically.
[00:24:06] Shawn Lemon: Even if we shut down our computer or lose internet in the middle of that process, it picks up where it left off and then, or just tries again the next time so you don’t have to worry about that.
[00:24:18] Monica Froese: Right. Those will You want
[00:24:19] Shawn Lemon: another tip for files real quick? Yes. Okay. So on a Mac, when you click on Finder, it takes you wherever it wants.
[00:24:26] Shawn Lemon: I can’t even remember where it takes you automatically. I don’t want it. I never want it to open the folder that it opens. So I changed my preference. So on a Mac, you can go up to the finder menu and then choose preferences, and then you can choose any folder that you want it to go to. And in my case, I choose shared drives because I’m like you.
[00:24:45] Shawn Lemon: I don’t use my drive. I use shared drives for almost everything.
[00:24:48] Monica Froese: To be honest. I’m redundantly paying for backup because I have to pay for Apple because they’re backed up across my devices and I’m paying Google. And that’s illogical. [00:25:00] I probably pay more than I have to because all of my business files are being backed up between devices.
[00:25:04] Monica Froese: Yeah. And that’s silly when I can use the Google app. Desktop app,
[00:25:09] Shawn Lemon: right. The, actually the Google desktop app. Streaming. So it shows you everything that’s there, but it’s not actually on your computer, right? So you can’t consider that a backup, even if you’re on a Mac and you’re using Time machine. It’s not downloading all of the cloud contents to your external hard drive.
[00:25:28] Shawn Lemon: So it really is only in the cloud. Now, there are other ways to back that up. There are cloud services like afi.ai. You could sync to a na so which would be sonology, but then there’s a Mac app called Carbon Copy Cloner, and you can connect it to your cloud account and it will download. Five gigabyte chunks, put it on that drive and then clear those chunks off.
[00:25:52] Shawn Lemon: It can back up all a thousand gigs onto that drive for you.
[00:25:56] Monica Froese: Okay. That’s really good to know. ’cause I am very fanatical about [00:26:00] backing things up and I have two external hard drives in my house actually. Mm-hmm. That everything backs up. My family calls me the keeper of memories and I’m always worried about losing my kids’ pictures.
[00:26:08] Monica Froese: We,
[00:26:08] Shawn Lemon: you have to be diligent about this stuff because the technology is lovely until. It’s horrible and you lose things.
[00:26:16] Monica Froese: Well, my corporate job was in tech, and I remember when cloud computing became like the word that people were using and I had such a hard time when it first started being a jargon. It was like in my early twenties.
[00:26:28] Shawn Lemon: Yeah. I
[00:26:28] Monica Froese: was talking about the cloud and I would get so annoyed. I like, what is this mystical cloud that we are talking about? Uhhuh? I just could not wrap my head around what it was. And now Uhhuh, I feel like a lot of people that, especially that go into business, they’re solopreneurs and they. Grown up with the cloud and they don’t really understand the importance of backing things up outside of it.
[00:26:47] Monica Froese: So I think that’s an important thing for people to take away too, from this. Yeah. Um, okay. I have a question and then I wanna talk about project management. That’s a big thing that you guys mm-hmm.
[00:26:55] Shawn Lemon: Up
[00:26:55] Monica Froese: with. But I am just curious how much of your business is working one-on-one with clients [00:27:00] versus selling your, your
[00:27:02] Shawn Lemon: resource library?
[00:27:02] Shawn Lemon: The resource library is a small part of that. I offer it to new subscribers who are coming in. And I just haven’t created a whole campaign around it. So it’s something I created to support my one-on-one clients so that they could do more work themselves that they wanted to and reduce the cost of working with us.
[00:27:22] Monica Froese: Do you plan on maybe making that a bigger part of your business? Selling it?
[00:27:26] Shawn Lemon: Definitely. It was an experiment that I started last year that I’ve just continued to add to, and then I’ve completely revamped it earlier this month, or actually late May. And now I’m really excited about where it’s at now and I feel really good about it.
[00:27:42] Shawn Lemon: So I’m gonna probably start running ads and making it a bigger part
[00:27:46] Monica Froese: because the resource library is definitely something my audience would be interested in because Oh yeah, A of them are going to probably want to attempt it on their own and get some pointers.
[00:27:56] Shawn Lemon: Cool. So it’s a files organization guide.
[00:27:59] Shawn Lemon: So what we’re [00:28:00] talking about, I expand so much on this in the files guide, so you can go get that. From the link in the show notes and then you’ll get on my list and within three days of signing up, I’m gonna give you a really deep discount to the resource library that you can just go in if you want that, have at it, and it’ll be an a big chunk off for you.
[00:28:21] Monica Froese: Awesome. I have no doubt that people will jump on that. The other question I have for you is, do you still work one-on-one with clients or is it your team? Because I did notice you do have a team.
[00:28:30] Shawn Lemon: It’s mostly my team. I do the. Sales stuff in the beginning. What’s going on? Do you need us? Can you do this by yourself?
[00:28:39] Shawn Lemon: What are we trying to accomplish? And create the initial strategy from there. It’s a framework that we take our clients through, and then everything’s customized depending on what they need. My people are really good at doing that, and if they ever need help, I come in on it. I end up finding out all of the new stuff.
[00:28:57] Shawn Lemon: And then I do an AI [00:29:00] mastermind. That’s actually what I’m doing a little bit later today. It’s a half hour mastermind where I’m showing from basics to creating beautiful PDFs with a single click using AI tools and stuff like that. Then I’ve got implementation blocks where it’s just kinda like a homeroom right after that.
[00:29:16] Shawn Lemon: We can chat. I can help you implement anything, and then I’ve got another coworking time once a week. Every Friday at 11 Central. I do an hour of homeroom where I’m gonna show up and anyone else can join in and work on stuff, ask me questions. We just keeping the momentum going.
[00:29:34] Monica Froese: So is this like a program you sell this?
[00:29:36] Monica Froese: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:29:37] Shawn Lemon: It’s called Get Organized and Stay that way. So it’s our one-on-one offering and we’ve got two offers for it, two 90 minute sessions per month, and then unlimited thirties with my coaches to get stuff done, or four nineties and then the unlimited thirties. We really want to just give people as much time and they can go as fast or as slow as they want to, and then just give you a bunch of resources in addition to that.
[00:29:58] Shawn Lemon: So you’ve got help. If [00:30:00] you like the videos and you want to go far fast, you can watch those and then lean on your coach. How do I apply this to me? So it’s a really nice hybrid approach.
[00:30:09] Monica Froese: Okay. That’s good to know. I’m interested in that too.
[00:30:12] Shawn Lemon: Cool. Alright. We can chat about it.
[00:30:13] Monica Froese: Yeah. Okay, so now let’s talk about project management.
[00:30:17] Monica Froese: I tend to think I’m a pretty good project manager. My team makes fun of me because usually I become the roadblock until there’s a project plan I’ll sign. Campaign to someone, let’s say. Yeah. And they’ll ask me questions about it and just, I can’t answer them. My right hand person will always say to me, you need Monica.
[00:30:34] Monica Froese: Just please go make the project plan because you’re gonna be useless to the rest of us. Until you have your project planned created. Yeah. But apparently I am also in the minority for this because a lot of people don’t know how to create a project plan. Yeah. So we use Asana and I’m also, for whatever reason, cannot use any other method by the Kanban method.
[00:30:52] Monica Froese: Okay. And I think it’s because when I started on Trello and the limitation, unless they changed it that I had on Trello, was you couldn’t enter a [00:31:00] sign. Between tasks or between projects, like it just got really messy. I can’t believe
[00:31:05] Shawn Lemon: they still haven’t fixed that. They’re losing so many people because of this.
[00:31:08] Monica Froese: And I first was overwhelmed to get everything out of Trello into Asana, but just in case anyone doesn’t know this, there’s tools that lag. Agree to do it. Oh yeah. Yeah. Which tool do you recommend the most for project management? Is there one?
[00:31:19] Shawn Lemon: It’s usually been Asana and now my project management specialist, Annie, she’s obsessed with Hive.
[00:31:27] Shawn Lemon: We’ve become Hive Partners, occasionally Clickup, she’s actually moving people into Hive.
[00:31:32] Monica Froese: So what’s the deal with it?
[00:31:34] Shawn Lemon: It’s a smaller team and they’re working harder and they tend to, it’s a halfway point between Asana and Clickup. So the strength of Asana is, it’s really on rails, like in that there’s a structure that you just have to follow.
[00:31:51] Shawn Lemon: We’ve got teams inside of teams or projects inside of projects or sections. That have milestones, tasks, and subtasks. [00:32:00] And so you just follow that and that’s the structure. And you’ve got the sidebar and it’s set up the way it is, but you can customize your home screen. Clickup is like this blank canvas that you can do whatever you want with, but so many people really get lost in the tool rather than just doing project management.
[00:32:19] Shawn Lemon: When you’ve got so many tools available, it’s easy to spend too much time working on that. That’s why I’m not a fan of notion either. It’s really cool. But for the majority of people that we work with, it’s too many open loops and things that you can just play with. So Hive is in between, and so there’s a lot of different things like being able to do client proofs.
[00:32:42] Shawn Lemon: So you can have client proof, so you don’t get that in Asana. So it’s really good with how they do guests. Their AI integration is way better than what Asana is right now, but yesterday they just did a new release, so I don’t know what that new release is for Asana yet. But Hives stuff is actually really [00:33:00] good.
[00:33:00] Shawn Lemon: I think there’s an extra view. They’ve got an email client built in, which normally I do not like. Let’s keep email for email and then project management otherwise. But there are some cases where the majority of the emails are related to projects that have to be managed because they’re complex, and so it actually makes sense to have it built in for some people.
[00:33:24] Shawn Lemon: It’s this kind of where you have more flexibility, more features than you have in Asana, but you still have the structure.
[00:33:30] Monica Froese: So that’s why I could never get into Clickup because Link Canvas did not work for my Type A Brain. I,
[00:33:35] Shawn Lemon: it’s so overwhelming for me.
[00:33:36] Monica Froese: Yeah, same. I’m like, that’s why Asana once, once I really like took the time to look at Asana, I’m like, oh, this makes plenty of sense for my brain.
[00:33:46] Monica Froese: Yeah. So are you guys teaching people how to. Project manage, or are you actually managing their projects for them?
[00:33:53] Shawn Lemon: Teaching them?
[00:33:54] Monica Froese: You’re teaching them. Okay. So you’re setting up the system for your clients and then they’re taking it [00:34:00] and plugging in all their information
[00:34:01] Shawn Lemon: and we’ll sit there with them and build it.
[00:34:04] Shawn Lemon: So we had one client, he is a Chick-fil-A operator. So we did email for him and his assistant using missive, and then we moved on to files for the whole team. And then we got into project management. Annie used to work for them, so she was project manager for them. And so she’s got this whole methodology of no fail meetings and stuff of just a good structure for meetings and how to track tasks, and she’s blended that together.
[00:34:29] Shawn Lemon: So she helped, and he’s a customer of theirs. They all made sense. So we built them a whole different projects for the different departments so that they could have really efficient meetings. And so she built all that out and a whole like hiring plan. ’cause they hire so many people. That’s one project.
[00:34:45] Shawn Lemon: Another one, we help got a client who builds space ports and stuff like that. And so it’s like you guys know the process, we know the tools and how to think about it, so let’s bring it together and help you to create what you actually need built on [00:35:00] how you work and how you think. That’s all theoretical at first, and then it goes into practice and you realize, oh, we don’t actually do it that way.
[00:35:07] Shawn Lemon: I don’t like that. And so that’s why we like having a month to month relationships and at different levels so that once you’ve got the main project done, then you can maintain a relationship and continue to tweak until it’s like, all right, I’m in a pretty good place.
[00:35:21] Monica Froese: Do you have any like basic tips for someone who’s getting start?
[00:35:24] Monica Froese: Like they’re on their post-it notes? Yep. Or they’re using something basic like Google tasks. Mm-hmm. Can’t even comprehend getting themselves into a project management system.
[00:35:32] Shawn Lemon: Yeah. So I would say don’t do what everyone tells you to do, which is to do a brain dump and put all of your tasks into a project manager.
[00:35:42] Shawn Lemon: That it’s a perfect way to get totally overwhelmed and to stall out. And you’ll get really excited with this massive dopamine hit first. Then it’s quickly overwhelming. So if you need to do a task dump to just get everything in your brain somewhere, do it in a document, [00:36:00] call that your back burner or something else, and then we’ll take a look at that list and realize what are the things on this list that are the most important that will move the business forward?
[00:36:13] Shawn Lemon: Do I need to finish this client project? Do I need to manage that client project, but I also have to do this other thing. So maybe we do some major client stuff, but then also some initiatives for the business and give yourself like a max of three, and we put that into our project manager. And it’s just like those one to three things to get started and don’t put anything else in there.
[00:36:35] Shawn Lemon: And this is the main place that you go to manage that project. This is something that it’s more than a single task. So this is where you look at the tools and you wanna learn your project management. If it’s a marketing project, what’s a part of it? So we’ve got an email campaign, we need a landing page for it.
[00:36:53] Shawn Lemon: We need some social media posts, and we need to figure out all the automations. So we have four sections [00:37:00] right there. Inside of that, we can create some milestones and then break up the tasks of what actually needs to get done. And the more you get familiar and the more you work it, then you can start adding things in once you feel like you’ve really got a handle on this.
[00:37:14] Shawn Lemon: ’cause this is human behavior. Just like you have a hard time implementing a new habit or breaking a habit, this applies. And so you really want to treat this seriously and. Allow yourself to start small and build wins so that your unconscious mind will trust this system. ’cause if it doesn’t trust it, it’s gonna pull you right back to paper or whatever you were using before
[00:37:39] Monica Froese: along this line of putting too much into your project management system.
[00:37:42] Monica Froese: I have found this way leap for now. It works for my brain where I feel like I have all these moving pieces in my personal life in the business. And I also am a single mom, so it’s just like I need a central place. Mm-hmm. Where everything that needs to get done or recurring tasks Yeah. Goes, so I always look at my [00:38:00] Asana as, is this a project that’s gonna have multiple tasks broken down, like our email marketing campaigns or when we’re launching?
[00:38:07] Monica Froese: Mm-hmm. But then there are these random things. So I’m curious what you would do with these random things. I have these random things. That’s okay. I have to remember to pay that invoice, or I have to remember to pay New York State Tax. Actually, I have to do that today. And that actually is a recurring task that I put in my Google tasks because where would it sit in my Asana to remember to pay it
[00:38:24] Shawn Lemon: in finance.
[00:38:25] Monica Froese: Okay.
[00:38:26] Shawn Lemon: And the finance team under just, and I just have a main finance project, and then I built others as needed that were actually projects. But I’ve got a section called Taxes. Inside of taxes are like 10 recurring tasks, so personal taxes, corporate franchise, and excise business tax. All of the different taxes that we have that are due at different times, they have different due dates.
[00:38:52] Shawn Lemon: In the description are the instructions with the link to that specific place, and they’re, all the due dates are set [00:39:00] for a few weeks before it’s actually due.
[00:39:03] Monica Froese: I should do that.
[00:39:04] Shawn Lemon: So my Asana is way more built out than what I just recommended because I am five years into it. But at first it had to be so limited and then I will expand it because that’s how I think.
[00:39:18] Shawn Lemon: ’cause I just tend to complicate things and then realize I’ve overcomplicated and have to simplify again. That’s just my natural flow, and so it’ll get too big and then I have to narrow it down. So my personal stuff that I have to remember, I use Apple’s Reminder app and so he said, remind me on Tuesday morning to pay the invoice, put chandelier light bulbs on my Home Depot list.
[00:39:41] Shawn Lemon: So that’s my main thing, so that when I’m at Home Depot, I just pull up the list and I know what I need to buy, and then when the invoice is due, I get a reminder when it’s due. So that way it’s in the background. My other random tasks I might actually use chat GBT for. So I created a project manager [00:40:00] conversation.
[00:40:01] Shawn Lemon: So I have a DHD, so I tend to just want to do so many different things and then forget. About what I just did an hour ago because I got this new idea and said, no, I need to focus back. And so I can go back to this and be like, I’m feeling overwhelmed. Let’s recenter. What projects do we current have? This is what’s happening this week.
[00:40:21] Shawn Lemon: And then so we just work through it together. And then I can shift my priorities, create some time blocks on my calendar, and shift any due dates around in my project manager. So this way I don’t have to lean on Annie because I pay Annie as a contractor. So anytime that I’m spending with her, I’m paying for.
[00:40:42] Shawn Lemon: So if I can do that more in chat GBT, then great. Then she’s got more time with clients.
[00:40:48] Monica Froese: I have found that chat, GPT is really good for helping me like work through my priorities, these different projects, and I tell it about it. Like I’ll start the week with, I have all its content I have to create. These are all the things that, what I [00:41:00] have found though is when I go into the nitty gritty to dos with it, sometimes it gets them,
[00:41:05] Shawn Lemon: oh yeah.
[00:41:06] Monica Froese: So it’s not good at reprompt me in that sense, and that’s why I still use Google tasks because I know it’s there.
[00:41:12] Shawn Lemon: So that’s why. I have that there, but that’s more of me just thinking about what’s going on and processing it. And because I’m a verbal processor too, so just like getting all of that out of there.
[00:41:24] Shawn Lemon: And then I either do it immediately or we have a few tasks that I’m working on throughout the day.
[00:41:29] Monica Froese: So I Would you say accurately, like the way I view chat GBT is, it is not for the nitty gritty, it is for structure and it helps you thread things together like seems It gets to learn you like that’s why I use it personally and in the business.
[00:41:44] Monica Froese: Yes. Gay will tell me. Like the other day I wanted to write an email to my mom list. It said, Hey, you should talk about how your kids were in the hot tub and having fun like it remember, ’cause I was like just telling you all the things I was doing that day and it like threaded it together. So that’s really cool.
[00:41:57] Monica Froese: But if I told it some nitty [00:42:00] gritty thing that I have to do, it will get lost. It’s like a high level thinker almost for you.
[00:42:04] Shawn Lemon: And that’s what it is. It’s given a ton of information. It finds the theme and assigns a character for it, and then compresses that again. So it’s constantly. Compressing and blending things, so that’s why it’s terrible for tech support.
[00:42:22] Shawn Lemon: You can’t blend tech support articles. It’s exact steps or it doesn’t work, and so it provides. Horrible troubleshooting unless you use my GPT. And so I’ve given it all of these rules and then it doesn’t blend. You know the steps, but even still with explicit instructions, it’ll just forget my instructions.
[00:42:41] Monica Froese: I know
[00:42:42] Shawn Lemon: it’s crazy. It’ll say, don’t use M dashes. It says, great. Here it is without M dashes and there’s 3M dashes in it.
[00:42:49] Monica Froese: I don’t know why JGBT is so obsessed with M dashes. I know. I know. They’re,
[00:42:53] Shawn Lemon: and they’re technically correct. My father-in-law, he is a CEO of a. Big publishing house and so he’s, I use M dashes all the time.
[00:42:59] Shawn Lemon: I was like, [00:43:00] but normal people don’t like So many of your people are copywriters? Yes. They use M dashes, but we don’t. All the plebs out there.
[00:43:09] Monica Froese: Okay. This was a great conversation. I have to ask because we’ve been talking so much on the podcast about AI and I’m like obsessed with trying new tools, but I get overwhelmed by it.
[00:43:18] Monica Froese: I will say, and that can really bring out the A DHD with, oh, this tool looks cool. Let me try to get it and it can be distracting. But what are like the core AI tools that you use in your business?
[00:43:27] Shawn Lemon: Chad, GBT four is my go-to. Most of my conversations happen there when I need unbiased because it is insanely biased.
[00:43:39] Shawn Lemon: It just assumes you’re correct with so much stuff. I use a private tab so it doesn’t reference any of my previous conversations. Also, if I just want a different perspective, I use grok. I think it does a good job for a lot of things, so that’s my backup. I often clear all of the history, so I go in and I just keep it clear.
[00:43:57] Shawn Lemon: So I try and keep that account as clean [00:44:00] as possible without any sort of bias. Missive, so it has some AI tools built in Gamma. Gamma is what I’ll use to create landing pages or PDFs or presentations extremely quickly. Let’s see, what else am I using? There is a free markdown to HTML converter, so I used to have to do that before they fixed that.
[00:44:24] Monica Froese: Have you ever messed around with, I think it’s called Google lm, where you can create the two week
[00:44:28] Shawn Lemon: notebook? Lm? I haven’t used it yet.
[00:44:31] Monica Froese: My daughter, she’s in seventh grade, she’s 12 and the other day we’re in exam weeks right now. Yeah. And she was sitting scrolling on her phone and I’m like, don’t you have an exam tomorrow?
[00:44:41] Monica Froese: And she said, yeah, I’m studying. And I was like. It looks like you’re in social media. It does not look like you are studying. Mm-hmm. Oh, one of my best friends, she takes extremely detailed notes and she uploaded it into Notebook lm and created a podcast, a study guide podcast, and she took the test yesterday and I said, so [00:45:00] how did it go?
[00:45:00] Monica Froese: That’s the only way she studied was with this podcast. She goes, yeah, it was super easy and my mind was blown, to be honest with you. I was like, that’s so cool. Can you, I can’t even imagine. I was such a detailed note taker as well, and I have a photographic memory, which is. People always think, I’m kidding when I say that, but I’m not.
[00:45:16] Monica Froese: I would have to write out all my notes again, and I could tell when I was studying because I wrote it out again, that’s how I memorized. But then I would highlight certain things, and in my memory I could actually recall exactly where it was written in my notes taking the test. And it made me wonder if this would’ve helped me, if it would’ve worked for me, because I’m sure it doesn’t work for everyone.
[00:45:36] Monica Froese: But I just thought that these 12 year olds, what a clever use. For ai,
[00:45:41] Shawn Lemon: for auditory learners, that’s, yeah. Sometimes I can see it and like I can see, oh, it’s a left, it’s a right, whatever. And I need to see it. I need to write it. And other times I can remember conversations so well. And so switching something from text to audio or just having both of [00:46:00] them to reinforce would be so good, especially if you were to take it creatively, like insert stories and illustrations about that.
[00:46:09] Shawn Lemon: I remember being so frustrated with this math teacher that I had. It doesn’t matter what grade, but I would ask him questions and he’d say, read the chapter. I did read the chapter. I’m like, that’s what a teacher is there for, because I’m reading it and it still does not make sense to me. I had to have a tutor for algebra and I just had to do it over and over again and have some examples, and then all of a sudden it clicked.
[00:46:34] Shawn Lemon: I. I didn’t need another tutoring session because it’s, it’s, oh, I completely understand now. But it just took a while in practice and then, you know, a different perspective. So being able to have these tools I think is really neat for education.
[00:46:49] Monica Froese: I. Interesting to see by the time he hits seventh grade, the different ways AI is helping these kids learn.
[00:46:54] Monica Froese: Thank you so much for this conversation. Oh man. Can you tell us how people can connect with you? I will share the direct link [00:47:00] to, so they can sign up for your guide on files and that will get them into the sequence. So if they wanna learn more from you, where else can they connect with you?
[00:47:06] Shawn Lemon: Yeah, so we’re on all the social media platforms.
[00:47:09] Shawn Lemon: You just search the digital organizer, or it’s Facebook slash the digital organizer, whatever. So we’ve got that locked down on basically everything. Then there’s a website, so easy to find the digital organizer.com. We’ve got a great quiz, so if you’re not sure where you need to start, you can start with a quiz and that’ll give you a score on each area and give you a good starting place.
[00:47:29] Shawn Lemon: If you’re interested in working with us one-on-one, you can find us from that website and go ahead and book a call and. We’ll go from there.
[00:47:35] Monica Froese: Thank you again, and we’ll be sure to link to all of this in the show notes for people, and I hope everyone enjoyed the conversation. That’s a wrap on today’s episode, but your next step starts right now.
[00:47:47] Monica Froese: If you’re serious about selling digital products and want the AI powered tools expert strategy in real human support to make it happen, then you need to check out the Empowered Business Society. Inside you’ll get AI driven [00:48:00] trainings to create and sell digital products faster. A private community for expert feedback and real time support.
[00:48:05] Monica Froese: Exclusive access to the Monica Memo Podcast. And if you go pro, you’ll get monthly marketing shortcuts Live q and As, and 20% off of the Empowered Shop perpetually because smart business owners. Sell smarter. They don’t work harder. And the best part, you can get started for as little as $9. The best business growth happens when AI and real humans work together.
[00:48:27] Monica Froese: Ready to make your next move? Join us inside of the Empowered Business Society. You can check us [email protected] board slash society. See you in the next episode.
