Ellen Donnelly - CEO and Founder of the-ask.uk

This is what Ellen said during our last call:

“It was super helpful to have these weekly sessions. I had the fear of building this fancy system to then end up not using it, but I can’t imagine how I would stop using it now. There isn’t a thing that work better than this. I now feel dependant on this system for my business”

The Problem

Ellen, Founder of the-ask (an UK-based coaching company), was starting to scale her business but realised things were getting messier over time and out of control.

She also wanted to gain some of her time back to focus on what makes her business grow (landing pages, sales pages, digital courses, social media and community)

She’s also a big picture creative person and she felt she was not having that big picture mindset. She was working IN the business rather that ON it.

The Proposed Solution

Excerpt from our email conversation:

• We’ll build a minimum viable system so we can slowly start to systemize your tasks and projects/objectives.

• We’ll understand which kind of system and workflows we’re going to need to make sure that the system fits the way YOU work.

• Once we understand what works with you, we can start scaling to a more complex task management system to accommodate your current and future team.

• We will also tackle life admin so we can have everything within Notion

• AND I will focus on accountability to make sure that you actually use the system, and if not, we will understand why and fix it.

Scope

• Task management system for her and later for her team

  • Create a template dashboard for team members

  • Link google calendar with Notion

• Weekly review set-up

  • Objective, to force her to schedule her weeks in advance (big picture thinking)

• Content management system

The Process

The most important part of a productivity system is always the Task database. Everything revolves around it.

Through a series of questions, we drafted the simplest task database possible (below)

System building should also take into consideration the adaptation period the user goes through. This system is something new to her, so I needed to make this process as painless as possible for.

That’s why we started small.