#271 - Lead Liste, Onboarding Prozess, Social Media Planung – mit Notion alles an einem Ort. - Taina Pereeniemi

Shownotes

Eine der größten Herausforderungen, wenn dein Business wächst!? - Alle Infos, die auf Post-ITs, in Excel-Listen, in verschiedenen Tools und in deinem Kopf "abgelegt” sind, zentral zu speichern.

Dabei ist das super wichtig, damit du

➡️ den Platz in deinem Kopf für wichtigere Themen nutzen kannst

➡️ du nicht das Bottleneck in deinem Business bist, von dem alles abhängt

➡️ deine (zukünftigen) Teammitglieder wissen, was wie zu tun ist.

Notion ist ein super Tool dafür, denn es ist ein wahres Multitalent. Mit Notion kannst du

✔️ deine To Dos managen

✔️ die Infos deiner Kund:innen übersichtlich verwalten

✔️ deine gesamte Social Media Planung abbilden

✔️ deine Verkaufsroutine unterstützen

✔️ deine Prozesse dokumentieren

Und keine liebt Notion so sehr wie Taina Pereeniemi. Die sympathische Finnin hat für Laura und Gretel in 2022 einen eigenen Notion Workspace aufgesetzt. Game Changer, sagen wir mal.

Wann der richtige Zeitpunkt ist, um mit Notion zu starten, warum Prozesse so wichtig sind und warum Notion besser ist als andere Business Tools, das erzählt uns Taina in der neuen Folge MOIN um NEUN. Aus Tainas Sicht gibt es nämlich eigentlich nur eine Sache, die Notion nicht kann. Was das ist? - Hör dir die Folge an und du erfährst es. (Premiere übrigens: Das ist die erste Folge auf Englisch!)

Instagram Von Taina: https://www.instagram.com/taina.pereenniemi/

Website von Taina: https://www.tainapereenniemi.com/letstalk/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lauraundgretel

Website Laura und Gretel: https://www.lauraundgretel.de

Website Gretel: https://gretelniemeyer.com/

Website Laura: https://lauraroschewitz.de/

Instagram Gretel: https://instagram.com/gretelniemeyer?igshid=ltjayyzufj84

Instagram Laura: https://www.instagram.com/laura.roschewitz/

LinkedIn Laura: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-roschewitz/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWWzRSwcPtp5JwxyILbKD-g

Gretel Niemeyer: Moin. Hello and welcome to new episode of Moin um Neun, the Business Schnack by Laura and Gretel. And as you will realize, and it's a bit funny for me as well, this episode is going to take place in English. It's actually the first one in English, and that's due to my guest, Taina. And please, let's do it like this. You'll say your last name and I won't. So my guest today is Taina from Finland, and she's actually helping coaches and consultants who want to implement Notion as their tool of choice in their company. Taina, welcome. Nice to have you.

Taina Pereeniemi: Thank you so much, Gretel, for having me. So fun to be on the show. And I'm super honored to be the first person to be in an English episode.

Gretel Niemeyer: Yeah, I mean, it's so funny. You know, I've been speaking English so much in my previous life, so to speak, before starting a company, and now it's very rare. So it's like, Oh my God, I'm a bit nervous myself. But let's start let's start with you. So what's your full name and what is it you do exactly, Taina?

Taina Pereeniemi: Yes, happy to. Happy to tell you. So I'm Taina Pereeniemi. And what I do is I help coaches and consultants streamline their workload with these personalized business management systems on Notion. So what this means in practice is that I set up these like all in one workspaces in Notion, where they can manage everything from tasks and projects to processes to customers, leads and documents and team. So essentially helping them get rid of this chaos when it comes to keeping work and information organized and bringing it into a nice structure in one place, easy to find, easy to manage. So that way for my clients, it's easier to scale without becoming super stressed and overwhelmed while doing it.

Gretel Niemeyer: Yeah, and I can say that much. You're doing a really good job there because this is exactly what Laura and I have done this year. We had so many different places to store information this year and tool. We had obviously Excel sheets, we had Google Docs, Google sheets, whatever, email, Slack and so on and so forth. And we decided to bring it all together in a tool called Notion. And I've been or for me, Notions been around since about two years or so. How is it for you? I mean, there's so many other tools out there, right? There's like Trello and Asana, Notion, Click up.

Taina Pereeniemi: Yes.

Gretel Niemeyer: Yeah. And why did you decide to focus on Notion?

Taina Pereeniemi: Yeah. Excellent question. Yeah, I've been using pretty much all of the leading project or work management tools out there that you were listing there and also build some client workspaces on those other tools before and for me, it really boils down to the visual side and the flexibility of Notion. Always when I was using the other tools, I felt like really restricted by how you need to be setting up the workspace. It seemed like the developers of the system had kind of figured it out for you already, and there were a lot of features on these tools that you couldn't get rid of if you didn't need them. And then on the other hand, they were missing the possibility of setting up some things the way I would have wanted to. So I really fell in love with the flexibility of Notion, because you can make it just as simple as you need or as complex as you need and anything between. And really that way, it's possible to create such a personalized system that you actually love to use it every day. And it truly fits the way your brain works as a business owner and the way your team likes to run things and stay on top of their game.

Gretel Niemeyer: Yeah, and for example, for Laura and me, the situation or how it happened that we started to work together was that we had actually grown pretty fast. And, you know, we had all the knowledge and information in our heads and we realized, oh my God, we really need some structure now to say that this is the regular use case or what's the good, what's a good starting point to start using Notion? Because you could I mean, you could start with some templates. You could, you know, when do you need somebody like you to get the whole thing set up or what's a good minimum viable product there? Like the minimum viable setup, let's say? Yeah.

Taina Pereeniemi: So definitely when it comes to what kind of situation a business owner is in, I'll start with that. Definitely. When you feel like you have things in way too many places, it's hard for you to grasp even or remember what everything you should be paying attention to. What should be prioritized next? What are all the different things you have on your table and where to find them when you need them. That's when you, first of all, need to start. Um, implementing some tool like Notion to bring things in one place and to keep things organized and prioritized and streamlined in that way. And then when it comes to actually creating that sort of minimum viable product of a management system on a tool like Notion, there are different ways to go. One of them is to set it all up yourself by learning how Notion works, watching some courses, YouTube videos, but that's maybe usually not the best way for a very busy business owner because that can take a long while and it would all be time away from doing your actual work and getting those clients and serving those clients. But then, sorry, I'm still having a little bit of COVID from last week in my voice, but. Yeah. So then as you mentioned, Notion also has a huge amount of free and paid templates out there that you can use to set up something quickly. And that's often where many of my clients have already also started. So they've looked at Notions template library, maybe set up a lead tracker or a simple task manager, or maybe bought a template from some Notion creator out there. And that can be that can work nicely as like a minimum viable product to get some first things organized there. But then at some point that usually becomes a problem when you build your system of these, like separate templates that haven't really been designed to work together, there is no connection with, for example, how you manage your clients, how you manage your tasks, and they don't speak to each other. And also they have not really been designed with your business needs in mind. So they're kind of working, but not really. So if, if you really then want a system that's a good fit and that actually scales with your team and your business, I highly recommend looking at getting a Notion consultants help, which is something that I do, because then we can really look into what it is that your business needs, how you would like things to work and make sure that everything, all of that becomes a coherent whole. That's where the pieces are actually working nicely together.

Gretel Niemeyer: Yeah, I think you've done a very nice thing again now, because this is actually for everybody who's listening. This is actually how our working together worked or happened. Like Laura and me, we came with many thoughts and we need this and we have this here and how about that? And we have no clue about this. And this is a bit how my question was like, What about this and this and this Taina? And then the first thing you do is to structure the question. It's like, okay Gretel, first we're going to do this and now we're going to do that. And so this, as I said, when we worked together, was pure magic for me all all the way through. Like when your clients come with so many ideas and thoughts and things and then again, they don't know the system, actually, they don't know what can be done, how it can be done, and they just throw it all at you and you somehow create some workspaces out of it. Again, that was pure magic for me. But let's be so let's let's just imagine somebody like me sitting there and not knowing what the system can do. Can you give us like two examples of how you can actually use Notion? You meet you mentioned the lead list and the client information, but a bit more specifically, what can you do with Notion?

Taina Pereeniemi: Yes, so. What do you when you like, take Notion as a tool? What you first get is you get these like different kinds of like blank canvases. And these blocks, which are like Lego blocks that you can put together in different ways. Databases where you can structure and organize different kinds of information and data. But when you use those building blocks and the blank canvas and pages, that Notion is about you can start setting up some really sophisticated stuff on top of it. So some good examples of things we commonly set up for my clients include. Well, first of all, one of the core things are task and project management. Then we with all kinds of weekly planning possibilities, assigning and delegating tasks to team features so that they can fully, fully manage their tasks and projects in one place. Then another thing we very commonly set up is. Everything that comes to managing the client relationship. So that can be about tracking the sales process, those leads in your sales pipeline, then moving them on to when you close them, moving them to onboarding and after onboarding, managing the whole client journey in your coaching or other programs you have. Um, also managing the, like basic constant contact information behind those client projects. So who you're working with, what are all the details. Their VAT numbers, their preferred payment methods, whatever. So keeping all that information organized and then there's a lot of stuff that comes to delivering those client projects, such as coaching notes or documents the client sends you, things like that. So all of that can be brought into the right context, managed so that it's easy to find at the right time. Also outside of the tasks and the client relationship management. Other typical use cases might include managing and tracking goals, managing and tracking different kinds of notes and meeting memos, processes and SOPs. That's a very common one for for entrepreneurs. Content planning, meaning how you plan your social media posts and schedule them together with your team. What else? Even financials we might manage for some clients and things like hiring new team members or managing the people on your team and everything that comes along with that. So really. Kind of your imagination. Your creativity and imagination is kind of the limit to what you can manage in Notion any time you have some work or some information that should be structured better. There are ways we can find to organize that on top of Notion.

Gretel Niemeyer: Mm hmm. And you've mentioned you mentioned it now and also in your Instagram, I think you talked about it quite a while, is the topic of SOPs. And I'm pretty sure that there's a lot of people who have no idea what SOPs are, even with the German translation. Could you let us know what it is and why you're so? I wouldn't say obsessed about it, but why it's so why why it's so important from your point of view.

Taina Pereeniemi: Sorry. Yeah. Yeah, SOP is definitely a three letter abbreviation. Every entrepreneur out there should know about. But still, I can tell you there are many, many people who haven't yet come across it, and it can bring all sorts of trouble in the business. But what it is about the standard operating procedures are essentially these like step by step guides or instructions to how you run certain processes inside a business. Because in any business imaginable you will find certain routine things that take place multiple times and should be done in a pretty similar way every time. Examples of this could be how you onboard a new client to a program or how do you afford a client when they leave the program? Or how do you do your monthly accounting, how you update your website? All of these things happen more or less regularly and involve certain steps that should be taken in a consistent way. So what the SOP or standard operating procedure does is it helps you structure that information on what are the specific steps that need to be taken and maybe what are the documents and links and resources related to making those steps happen and bring that in one structured document that's called the SOP, so that then when you when the time comes to on board or client or do something else, you can just give that SOP to one of your team members. You don't have to have 100 meetings to make it happen. You don't have to open what's up and start going back and forth on what's going to happen next. But they're going to have the clear instruction right there. And then you can rest assured as the CEO that, Hey, my team can handle this. They don't need to ask me all these questions all the time. Things will be done as they should with the help of those SOPs. So it's really why I'm so passionate about it, because it's really such a key to successfully growing a business, be it consulting or coaching, or even any kind of business to successfully grow it and make sure your team is able to help you. It's something essential to put in place.

Gretel Niemeyer: Yeah, and in that aspect, I have to say the beauty also of working with you was that I'd say that we've also grown as business owners, right? Because now you've been talking about SOPs and how you have to create those things step by step. And honestly, for me, one of the biggest aha moments in our and our working together was also when you said, Oh no, it's not you has to write down all the SOP.

Taina Pereeniemi: Oh yeah.

Gretel Niemeyer: Let's let the team member who actually does the process write it down. So the person who actually does the onboarding next time she does it, she writes down every step and the next time after that, she just checks if everything is correct. And if this SOP is working out. So it doesn't mean that there's I mean, obviously there's initially more workload on us, maybe, But also the person who, you know, transfers all the information into the Notion workspaces, create SOPs and so on and so forth. It doesn't have to be the one running the business. So.

Taina Pereeniemi: Oh, yeah, you.

Gretel Niemeyer: Know, that was also like this moment. Like, you're right. That's why I hired a team.

Taina Pereeniemi: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, you're very right. Maybe in the beginning, when you're still operating solo, By the way, it's good to have SOPs already. Then when you're still working solo, then you know how everything goes. But when you. I have team members who have been doing certain things for you. They quickly become the actual experts in how to do it. So definitely it makes sense to outsource or delegate that SOP creation to the people actually daily working on those things as well. And by the way, that brings one thing to my mind, which is really important to mention about these SOPs, and that is that the only benefit is not just that you're able to run those processes more efficiently and more consistently, but then there's also this kind of risk aspect involved that. Even though you would love to keep your wonderful team members forever on your team, there's going to be a moment when someone becomes sick or someone decides to leave. They might even have to go very quickly when you don't have time to make any proper handovers. And if that happens without that person having documented as an SOP how they do these certain key things in your business, no one is going to know that you're no longer know all the details. No one else on your team knows all the details, so that part of your business would quickly actually become broken. And that would be a disaster if the person leaves. But when you have it documented as an SOP, it's super easy. Well, not super easy, but much more easy to bring a new person in and just hand them over the documentation of how things work and what they should be doing. And then you don't worry about then you don't need to worry about dropping balls and having important parts of how you operate become broken.

Gretel Niemeyer: Yeah, and I think you've said I mean, you've said a lot of smart things, obviously, but you've said an important thing here also that we sometimes only think about those questions like structure and sharing information on when we when we've already grown, you know, when actually even when we're still small business owners. You know, I think we in that situation, we often don't consider ourselves as CEOs yet or, you know, as business owners yet it's like, oh, no, I'm just doing my thing here and I'm just, you know, making money and serving clients and doing this and doing that. And I have to say also for us, it's sort of came as a surprise, like, Oh, oh, wow, yeah, we don't have anything anybody like any fixed team member, but we're working with four freelance people on a regular basis every month. This could actually be considered a team. Right. And it's it somehow happened quickly. And I think that's also one of the one of the reasons why people look into issues or topics like creating a structure with Notion pretty late because they don't consider themselves as the business owner, as the CEO yet. So this can only be like a wake up call. People, you know, have a look at your system, have a look at where spread information, how you share information with who you share information, how much of this info is in your heads versus on some paper at least or documented in some way? And yeah, reach out to Taina if you want to bring some more structure into your.

Taina Pereeniemi: Yeah, always happy to help.

Gretel Niemeyer: I'd also like to know I mean we've talked about your life as a business coach or an Notion coach, but what, how did you get there? Actually, I mean, you started your business in, I think, 2019. What did you do before and why did you decide to do this rather than anything else? Because you've you know, you have a master's degree in business and strategy and you had quite some work experience. Why on earth did you go for this topic and not something else?

Taina Pereeniemi: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for the question. Yeah. So as you mentioned, I, I come from a background of doing my studies in industrial engineering and management, focusing a lot on corporate strategy. And I used to work in the corporate and startup world where, where I was spending a little bit over a decade helping these larger teams and larger companies set up and run their strategy and business operations. So it was quite a different setting than working with Notion and working with smaller business owners like coaches and consultants. I really loved that work and… It was hugely challenging and such a learning experience. Getting to see how those large world class organizations run these things. But at some point I realized that, hey, there's a lot here that the entrepreneurs out there don't know about the best practices that could still be with a little bit of tweak and could be implemented for the small business context to help them run their businesses in with such an improved efficiency and help them scale their businesses in so, so much faster and with so much more less overwhelm. So I really felt like, hey, I want to take this learning and experience from working with bigger organizations, working in the corporate and startup world, and bring that to the context of helping small business owners run their teams and run their businesses better. So I felt like that's that's a mission where I'm really the right person to do that. And somewhere along the way, while still working in one startup, I had discovered Notion and I had been using it to organize my own work and set up some things for managing stuff in that company. But yeah, so it was a tool I really had grown to love and it felt really natural to bring my focus on using that tool as a platform to set up those processes and set up those practices and systems for these small business owners to run things in a better way. So yeah, that's kind of the logic behind making that shift. But then when it comes to actually like the mental shift of wanting to jump from the corporate safer track of doing things and earning your income into this bandwagon called entrepreneurship there personally, the turning point really for me was when my first child, Elsie, was born. It really. She's she showed me with her own example as a baby and a toddler how you don't need to take things too seriously. You can do what really feels fun and you can try and fall flat on your face and right back again and it doesn't matter. So it kind of sparked this inner child in me who felt like entrepreneurship was something that would be truly fun for me and that I would like really passionately enjoy doing every day. And I no longer worried about maybe getting some things wrong the first time and having to figure things out through some mistakes along the way. So somehow that really pushed me to make that dream happen. And I'm super happy. I was like courageous enough to to take that leap and start growing my own business back then.

Gretel Niemeyer: So thanks to Elsie, that's amazing.

Taina Pereeniemi: Forever grateful.

Gretel Niemeyer: And now you have two small kids, actually.

Taina Pereeniemi: Yeah, I do.

Gretel Niemeyer: Fairly, fairly small, both of them. How do you manage that? I mean, how is it do you have family around or is there a good support system in Finland to look after the kids? Or do you do that with your husband? Like how do you because I guess also Finnish kids get and.

Taina Pereeniemi: They do quite too often. Yeah. So yeah, definitely combining parenting with entrepreneurship, it's not an easy puzzle to solve for sure. There are times when things get quite messy, but for me personally, the biggest thing definitely is, is having a husband that is very supportive of what I do and wants to share all the responsibilities with me and the flexibility we have in our weekly and daily schedules of helping each other out to make things happen. So that's invaluable. And and as you said in Finland, we also have a really good support system in place from like the government in terms of providing inexpensive, high quality daycare for the kids and all sorts of other support for families to make their lives possible. So yeah, that's also something I'm really thankful as a Finn to have that support system in place. And yeah, but then I must say that. And this is not a sales pitch for Notion, but really truly actually having my stuff to gether in Notion organized is actually really critical for me to be able to perform my best even with this thing called live happening around me. So it really helps to have things clearly structured and prioritized so that when I have that little break in between of sick kids and getting someone to take their nap, I know how to best make use of that time to really push forward my priorities.

Gretel Niemeyer: I mean, and even though that wasn't the sales pitch, I think it was the perfect sales pitch. So how could people start working with you or where can they find you? I mean, we'll obviously link your Instagram and so on below the podcast episode, below the YouTube video and so on. But what's the what's a good way of starting to work with you?

Taina Pereeniemi: Yes. So the typical way I work with my clients is that I run the I run this Notion program where we first audit their business so that I get a full understanding of how they work, what are the main pain points they have when it comes to keeping things organized and streamlined? And then together with the business owner and their team, I design this personalized Notion set up to manage everything in an optimal way, and then I set it up for them so that they don't need to be the Notion experts. They don't need to find all the right templates out there and put them together. But everything is done for you. And then Sorry. Yeah. And so then I stick with them for a month to provide daily one on one support in Slack so that they get all their answers to their questions. And we still make adjustments and modifications to the system because you never know in the start exactly how it should be. But then when you start using it in practice is when you might notice how things should be done. So so that's like typical setting. I use to work with my clients alongside some smaller consulting things when people need. And if something like that sounds interesting to you, what I do offer is a free evaluation call where we sit down for 45 minutes to understand where you are and I can give you a better and more concrete idea of what your dream workspace might look like and what it would mean to work together with me. So if setting up a free evaluation call like that sounds interesting, you can find it on my website. That's www.tainapereeniemi.com/letstalk. So…

Gretel Niemeyer: We will link that, I guess.

Gretel Niemeyer: The latest and the last name people will be lost.

Taina Pereeniemi: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It's better to have the link somewhere handy but do reach out. No pressure, no cost. It's all free and we'll just have a chat and understand where you are and how we might be able to help you out.

Gretel Niemeyer: That sounds perfect. And you should also follow her for some advice on Instagram. Some great. Yeah, some great reels. I really enjoy that content. Last questions, because I didn't find that on your website or your Instagram. Tell us a fun fact about you. Taina, something that people don't know yet.

Taina Pereeniemi: Okay. Well, if you came to my kitchen, you'd be surprised of this cupboard that I have like full of teas. There's maybe 100 different teas all organized in different little boxes. So I'm a huge tea and especially green tea fan. So I love to love to maintain this collection of all kinds of fancy, fancy teas. And, and every morning I start with a very careful preparation of the perfect tea with the actual perfect temperature and time of having it in the in the water and things like that. So if you ever want to have a perfect cup of tea, you should come visit and, and my tea collection is pretty expensive.

Gretel Niemeyer: Wow. I mean, and again, it fits to your job with Notion, right? When you say it's all organized.

Taina Pereeniemi: Oh, yes.

Gretel Niemeyer: Little boxes and very neat and very structured.

Taina Pereeniemi: That's maybe the only thing I don't have organized in Notion, though. Maybe I should develop something around that as well.

Gretel Niemeyer: That'd be awesome. So, Taina, thanks so much for your time. Thanks for sharing all this information. Was a real fun chat. And again, I've learned a lot. I can by hard recommend working with Taina. She's made such a change to our business structure and organization. And if you want to have a good cup of tea, apparently just go and fly to Finland and she'll have the perfect tea for you.

Taina Pereeniemi: Yes. Thank you so much, Gretel. It was such a pleasure to to be talking with you this morning.

Gretel Niemeyer: Perfect. And for everybody else, you know, as with every episode, will be super happy if you give us some like some stars, some hearts, whatever it is that there is on the podcast host of Your Choice, go and check out Taina. Send us some comments about the show. Whatever it is, we're super happy to hear from you. And if not, we'll be around with the next episode of Moin um Neun. Bye bye.

Foto Gretel: Kareen Kittelmann Fotografie