We see you, frazzled service provider. We see you bustling and overwhelmed, reinventing the wheel every time you perform any admin task in your business. You’re building your proposals and forms from scratch, manually emailing clients repetitive emails in your process, chasing down payments, etc.

The overwhelming majority of service providers are, well, overwhelmed (and quite frankly, underpaid). We understand because we originated as a service-based business. There are 7 tips that massively helped us streamline our services and made a huge difference in our overall productivity, which is what we’ll be sharing in this blog post!

If you want to take this a step further with us to help you create a High-Touch Signature Service on Autopilot™ so you can work less and make more, we invite you to apply for The Incubator.

The biggest struggles we’ve seen service providers face includes difficulty landing high-paying clients consistently. They may land just one or two clients per month at their highest package, but the rest always fall on the smaller scale. This can lead to just breaking even each month, which leads to feelings of discouragement, worry, and self doubt.

But before we say “Just raise your prices!”, we understand that there are other steps that go into that as well. Part of being able to offer a premium package is providing more value through your client experience. That may sound to you like you need to start holding your clients’ hands more or putting more of your time into how you take care of them, but that simply isn’t the case.

You can completely transform your business with one single tool that we’re going to share with you in this blog post!

Canva takes the cake as one of our all-time favorite graphic design tools. Its user-friendly interface makes it the perfect go-to for small business owners (really, anyone) to create graphics for all different aspects of their business. Instead of having to use a super robust software like Adobe, Canva gives you all the best features wrapped up in one platform that’s available on desktop or the mobile app.

Even though it’s designed with the average user in mind, you face a learning curve with any tool or software. So today, we want to give you a complete walkthrough of Canva features inside the builder, plus how to use them!

So, you’re ready to get started with Dubsado as your CRM, but you’re unsure where the heck to start. We love Dubsado and would back it up with our lives, but we also know that, as with any software, it can be super intimidating to think about setting it all up. That’s where we come in!

We’re going to walk you through everything you need to know about getting your Dubsado account up and running in no time. When you break it all down, it really isn’t confusing or hard, there are just a lot of steps involved that can make it seem daunting.

So, save this post to come back to as you get to know Dubsado more and want to use it to its full potential! If you want, you can open up Dubsado in another tab now and read along as you set it up, but you definitely don’t have to complete all of this in one day.

Client onboarding is the most crucial beginning phase to starting a project with a new client. It sets the tone for the working relationship and can make or break your project depending on how you handle it. If handled poorly, it can lead to your client having a bad experience with you, and it’s the client experience that determines whether or not you’ll receive positive testimonials, repeat business, and future referrals. (No pressure!)

After working with clients during both our time as separate businesses and even after we first became business partners, we know a thing or two about client onboarding and making sure the client feels comfortable and taken care of before, during, and after the project.

With that said, let’s dive into our ultimate guide to client onboarding, plus crafting an extraordinary client experience!

One thing about us is that we’re always looking for ways to improve our systems and processes to keep things streamlined and running smoothly. And a favorite system of ours that allows you to do this very thing with your client processes is Dubsado.

When we were a service-based business that dealt with one on one clients, Dubsado was our absolute favorite CRM, and that was back when they were fairly new and weren’t as robust as they are now. Since they’ve made total updates and added new features, they’ve become every business owners dream system.

So, today, we’re going to share with you different ways that you can use Dubsado to streamline your projects and tasks!

Emylee here. Words like “systems”, “audits”, “workflows”, “processes” and “checklists” - they can either make the extreme Type A person rejoice and ask for more or they can make the whimsical creative clam up and cringe.

Here at Think Creative Collective, part of “thinking creative” is to put on the business hat every once in awhile so we can check in with our growth and sustainability. And that’s exactly what a systems audit does for you.

We are firm believers in waiting to invest until the time is right. That said, we never imagined how much we could benefit from using a free product. In fact, how much more money we would make — we’re talking over $125k in 9 months.