284: Automate What Doesn't Need You

Podcast
Written By Destini Copp
284: Automate What Doesn't Need You

You already have automations running. A welcome sequence, a few tags firing, maybe a workflow you built two years ago and have not looked at since. Then AI showed up and everybody started talking about automation like it was brand new, and now you are wondering whether what you have is still doing its job.

Steph Blake has been doing this for over a decade. She helps small business owners simplify and automate so they can work 20 hours a week or less, and in this conversation she walks through what she actually has running in her own business, which parts she refuses to hand over, and how to tell the difference.

In this episode

  • Why automating everything is the wrong goal, and what to look at instead
  • The one automation Steph thinks every business owner should already have running
  • How she turns every call into a searchable library of quotes, pain points and content ideas
  • The connectors she uses every single day and why your email tool should be first
  • How she built her own second brain in Google Drive instead of Obsidian
  • The 30 minute flash sale process that used to take her a day and a half

Resources mentioned.

Some of the links above are affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission if you sign up. I only share tools and programs I actually use and recommend.

If you are looking at your own business and cannot tell which pieces should be automated and which ones still need you, that is the work we do together inside the AI Mastermind.

Check out the AI Mastermind →

Episode transcript.

00:00Hi there, and welcome back to the Creator's MBA Show. My name is Dr. Destini Copp, and I'm super excited that you are joining me here today. So many of us have some type of automation running in our business already. You've got a welcome sequence, maybe you have some tags firing, and you feel pretty good about it. But then AI showed up, and now everybody's talking about automation like it's a brand new thing. And honestly, it can make you wonder if what you built two years ago is still doing its job.

01:00My guest today has been doing this for over a decade. Steph Blake helps small business owners simplify and automate so that they can work 20 hours a week or less, and she runs a membership called The Shortcut, where she hands members one thing she has personally built in her business every single week. Now, here's the part I want you to listen for as you listen to our conversation. Steph is not telling you to automate everything. She's telling you to look at what doesn't need you, and to be strategic about the rest. Let's get right into it.

All right, I have a guest here with me. I have Steph Blake. And Steph, I'm super excited about our conversation. We're going to be getting into all of it, all about automations and a little bit about AI. But before we get into all of that, can you tell the audience just a tiny bit about you and how you help people?

Yeah. First of all, thanks for having me here, Destini. I love chatting with you, so this is going to be a great conversation. But for those who don't know me, hi, my name is Steph Blake, and I help small business owners simplify and automate their businesses so that they can work 20 hours per week or less.

02:00I've been in the online space for over a decade, and I eat, sleep, and breathe automation, and now AI.

So this is going to be a really fun conversation. And that's what I want to start us off with, because I know a lot of people, when they think about automation, they may think it means a certain thing. And now we have AI getting into all of that and muddying the waters. I'm just curious, Steph, when I say automation, or when somebody is out there talking about automation, what does that mean to you?

Yeah. And it's so funny to talk about this now, because I've been helping people with automation for over a decade, but it feels like now people are like, "Oh, I understand what automation is because AI is here," which is just so crazy to me, because automation has always been around.

So automation is essentially having something run for you without you, right? Automation could be, like in your personal life, scheduling an order on Instacart. That is automated. Or it could be scheduling an email to go out for you. At a very simple basis, that is automation. You could have more advanced automations where it's an entire workflow working without you and just running on its own.

03:00And I think now that we are in this insane point in time where we are with AI, we can automate so many things much more easily, with the MCP connectors, that we weren't able to do before. We were able to do it before, it was just much more complex and much more difficult.

Which kind of brings up the question, almost all of us should be using this in our business, right? How easy is it today?

I know. One hundred percent, yes. One hundred percent of people should be automating, absolutely.

And we're going to get into all of that. And here's where I want to begin, because I know a lot of people who are listening to this, they're more advanced business owners. Most of them have been using automations. I would say 99.9 percent of them have been using AI quite a bit in their business.

04:00So I want to talk through the normal online business out there. What are some ways that we should be thinking about automation that we may have not brought into our workflows yet?

That's a great question. So what I would say first is I always tell people you don't have to automate everything. When people hear automation, they think it's all or nothing, and that tends to scare people. They're like, "If I automate my replies in my inbox, that's going to send the wrong message out and somebody's going to get mad at me, or I could lose a customer."

So when I'm talking about automation here, I'm talking about automating the things that don't need you. There are so many admin tasks that don't need you. We can do audits, we can update records. For example, I have a bunch of different automations in Claude set up to audit what's happening in my Kit account and then update records in Airtable. And again, that's just auditing so that I can see the data. Or if we want to create images with ChatGPT, I know that you love doing that, Destini.

05:00These are all different automations that we can set up, but I do recommend really understanding what you're wanting to automate, because it's not enough to just say, "Okay, I want to automate this task in my business." We have to think about it strategically, because some of those pieces of that automation should not be automated.

So we want to think about it like a process. Let's talk about inbox replies. This is one of my favorite things that I have automated with AI recently. Every single day, four times a day actually, I have Claude go into my Gmail inbox. It will read through what's in there. It will write drafts for me. It does not send them. It writes drafts in my tone of voice. It looks at other context, so it actually sounds like me. But I, at the end of the day, am the one reviewing that before I hit send. Or my team member is reviewing it before they hit send. We are not just sending these out.

So again, that's why there are some automations that can run without you. You don't need to worry about them. There are other automations where you do need a human in the loop, as they say.

06:00And I love that, human in the loop, because that is important. And as you were saying that, I was thinking about what I've taught people in terms of newsletter automations. Setting it up in Cowork and pulling from your Google Drive what your promo calendar is, or any sponsorships that you have, and automating all of that. And having the AI actually put the draft in Kit, I use Kit, but not hit publish, because you want that human to go in there and look at that. So I love everything that you were saying there.

You touched on it, and I want to take it a little bit further. As we are thinking about what we could automate, what should we be looking for, Steph? I have a lot of things in my business and I'm wondering if I could even automate them more. What do we look for there?

07:00This is the number one question that I get from people. And I don't like it, because it's so unique to each business. But I think that's something important to understand, because I can tell you the things that I automate in my business, but they may not be relevant for your business. For example, I don't use social media in my business, but if somebody else is using social media, it's not going to make sense for me to say, "This is the number one thing that you need to automate."

So I would say look at the things that don't need you right now. That's a very easy way to start. I'm not talking about drafting inbox replies. I think everybody should have that happening. I think that is basically a non negotiable. Everybody should have AI drafting replies for their inbox.

But other things that don't need you. So another example is I have Fathom record all of my calls. It gets a transcript, and there is an MCP for Fathom to connect to Claude. So every single day, I have an automation set up in my Claude account that will go into Fathom. It will grab that recording. It will take highlights of that call, put it into Airtable for me, and that's not something that I need to be doing.

08:00But what that does is it gives me a repository of content, honestly. Searchable quotes, pain points, content ideas, so that I literally will never run out of ideas for content, and it also allows me to create better sales pages, better emails, better copy. So those are two very different examples.

Again, if you are using Fathom, if you're using another tool that has an MCP, I highly recommend doing that as well.

I'm assuming that these are customer calls or client calls or program calls, and you're taking that information and using it in your marketing, basically.

Correct. Yeah, so I take every call. However, some things are private. So I have a skill set up for this. When I set up that skill, I gave it very specific instructions to say we don't want to use personal information, we don't want to divulge any numbers. So it doesn't even pull the entire transcript and put it in Airtable for me. It will just review that transcript, pull the most important pieces from that based on what it knows about me, my content, the work that I do, the people I help, and then that's what it's pulling into Airtable.

09:00Because it does no good to just have a random transcript there. A transcript is great, but I don't want the full thing. I want the good pieces, the testimonials. That's another big one. People were always saying such nice things about me on the call, and I would just forget about them. So now we can go through and it can say, "Oh, here's a really great testimonial we can pull out of here. We can send it to them for permission." So there are so many different ways that you can use that.

I love that. Okay, let's keep going. You gave us some really great ideas there. What are some other things that you have automated?

So another one, I actually just set this up today, so this is very timely. I have a 30 minute flash sale process. It's not 100 percent automated, but again, I don't want this to be 100 percent automated. Flash sales used to take me a day, maybe a day and a half, to come up with the idea, set up the pages, write the emails, get those scheduled. Now I've created a process where I can do that in 30 minutes.

10:00The vast majority of that process is automated. And when I say automated, I use Kit for my email, so it's writing the emails, putting those emails into Kit for me, putting information into Airtable, creating coupon codes. All of that is automated. My part is to say, "Okay, what do I want to run this flash sale for? What are my end dates?" And then I just need to review the copy to make sure it sounds great. It's so much easier than so many people make it out to be.

Yeah, so for that one, you're using the Kit connector. What other connectors are you using for that?

So for that one specifically, yeah, I use the Kit connector, and I file that away in Airtable, so I use the Airtable connector as well. But that's it.

How do you do your coupon codes? Is that automatically done and connected in?

Yes, that piece is also connected, so it can create the coupon code for me as well.

11:00Oh, and then I also create tags inside of Kit. I don't know if I mentioned that. So I create tags inside of Kit for that as well, and those are created inside of Kit through the MCP.

I love that, and the Kit MCP has been a big shift, I think, for everybody who's using it. Probably have heard about it by now. So okay, that's the Kit one that does a lot of that. What other connectors are you using that have made a real difference for you?

Oh my gosh. Let me pull up my account, because I would say Kit is probably my favorite one. It just does so much for you. It's so great. So even if you're not using Kit for your email tool, whatever email tool you're using, see if they have an MCP connector, because it will save you so much time.

Airtable, I use that literally every day. ClickUp, I use that every single day because I use ClickUp for my project management. Fathom, we talked about Fathom. I'm just looking through. I use all of these every day. Gmail, Google Calendar.

12:00Oh, Google Drive is another big one that I use, because you may have heard people talk about creating an AI brain or a second brain. I know a lot of people are talking about using Obsidian for this. I didn't want to use Obsidian, so I created my own system in Google Drive. So now pretty much everything I do is recapped inside of Google Drive for me through that connector.

So tell us a little bit more about that. I'm sure people would be interested in that.

Okay, so the reason that I set this up inside of Google specifically was because I was having these really great conversations with Claude. I was getting all of this context, but although Claude has built in memory, that information would get lost. I was previously backing up skills into Airtable, but I was like, "This system just does not work."

So what I did is I created my own system inside of Google Drive where everything is backed up throughout the day. Any conversation I have, all of the skills that I create, everything, all of that goes into Google Drive.

13:00So then if I wanted to talk to another AI tool, for example, if I wanted to go use ChatGPT, it can go into my Google Drive and it can look at that context so I'm not starting over on a new platform.

Or let's say I'm working in a project inside of Claude. Really, that project has the memory for that one project. It doesn't really look outside of that folder. So now this will allow that to happen. It's going to look at all of the context for all of the chats that I've had, everything about my business, and it will understand everything about me. It will write in my tone of voice, all of that.

So we do have that in skills. We have brand voice skills, brand brain skills. This really takes it to the next level. So regardless of which chat you're in, which platform you're using, it always knows everything about you, and the context is automatically updated on an ongoing basis.

Thank you for sharing that, and I love the fact that you found another way to set that up. I know a lot of people listening have heard about different ways to do that, like Obsidian, GitHub, and

14:00now you've done it with Google Drive. So I just want people to know that there's not one right way to do all of this, and I love that you have found that. And quite frankly, Google Drive is something that a lot of people feel comfortable with, so that's a good one.

Honestly, the reason that I chose Google Drive is because I don't like to store anything locally, and Obsidian requires you to use local storage. I do everything on the cloud. And the way that, from what I can tell, people are teaching Obsidian, it relies more on local storage, and that's not something that I want. I have multiple devices. I have a desktop, I have a laptop, I have a phone, and Google Drive is with me everywhere. So that's personally why I set it up that way.

Any other examples you want to share with us today of things that you have done? Or do you want to keep going through your connectors there?

I am. I'm looking at my connectors right now. Oh, the other one that I have is Meta Ads. This one is also so great because, Destini, you run so many ads.

15:00We can only get so much information from Ads Manager, and half the time it's not even 100 percent accurate. So what this connector does is it goes into your entire ad account and it can pull data. You can spot trends. It can say, "Okay, this worked. This didn't work. Let's revise this." Because again, it's not just pulling that data from Meta. It also has that context about you, about your business, about what your goals are. That one's really great.

I also have an MCP for my membership, The Shortcut, which I use as well, and we'll talk about that in just a second. I'm looking through. Lovable. I build a lot of apps, so I use that one as well to support me with that. And I would say those are probably, Cloudflare, I do a lot in Cloudflare. I would say those are probably the main ones.

Steph, what is something you have built recently in the back end that nobody else would see, but it's automating all the boring stuff?

16:00I do this all day long every day, so I'm trying to think of an example.

I know you have one. So now your brain is like, "Which one should I cover?"

That's exactly what I'm thinking. I'm like, "Which one should this be?" So I would say probably, I actually built this late last week. I built an entire automated dashboard for my ads and all of my organic leads. So for example, if I'm participating in a bundle or a summit, or I'm running ads, I have all of that data on one dashboard that automatically populates for me. So then I can see, okay, this was a really good event for me to participate in. I could see how many leads I got, how many people were new to my list, how much money it made me.

And the great thing about that is it automatically updates over time. So if I'm in your summit, Destini, and somebody comes and joins my list, I'm able to

17:00see how much money I've made from that one person, and that will tell me, okay, Destini's events are great events for me to be in. I definitely want to be in her events, because her people give me money. They like my stuff and they want to buy from me. I would say that's probably one of the most powerful things that I've built lately, because it gives me so much good information that I didn't have access to before.

Yeah, and I think you're bringing up a good point that all of these connectors and the AIs and how we're pulling everything together is doing just that. It's giving us data that we can make better decisions on. So if we're going to automate anything, it should be giving us dashboards like that and really helping us there.

Any last minute tips, anything that you want to mention before we wrap it up here?

Yeah, I would say my biggest piece of advice is definitely automate and don't be afraid of it. And even if you do have

18:00automation set up right now, and I'm assuming probably a lot of people do who are listening to this, great, but let's make sure that the automations are, first of all, up to date, that's really important, and that you're using them strategically and you're not just trying to automate things that aren't necessary, and you're not just spending time setting up automations for the sake of it either.

So I would really say that's the biggest thing to focus on. Let's make sure that we're automating as much as possible, finding those gaps where maybe we don't realize that there are things that we need to be automating. And then making sure that those automations are set up really strategically so that we bring that human in the loop whenever it's necessary.

The event that you're hosting right now, can you tell the audience just a little bit more about that and what they can expect in there?

Yeah, absolutely. So it is called Behind the Build: The AI Edition, and Destini is part of this, so it's going to be really great, because she's amazing. And basically what this is,

19:00we are peeling back the curtain to show very specific things that these contributors are building. There are no videos, which makes it very unique. So you can literally see what Destini is building in under five minutes, and then go and implement it in your business. So I'm giving you the exact shortcut. Copy and paste this into your business and you can start using it right away. And I would say the vast majority of them are focused on automation as well. So it's very easy to digest, very easy to implement. That's the whole focus of it.

And that link's going to be in the show notes. And Steph, can you tell the folks a little bit more about your membership and what you do there?

Yeah, absolutely. So my membership is called The Shortcut, and every single week I give the members one thing that I have personally built in my business for them to, guess what, get the shortcut on and implement. So it's, again,

20:00very simple. I'm not overwhelming you with tons of videos. You get one thing. So for example, let's talk about what we did before, the 30 minute flash sale. You'll get the step by step process for how to set that up in your business, but that's all you're getting that week, because I'm not here to overwhelm you. You're going to get that. You can go set it up.

We also have, like I said, the MCP connector. So all of the shortcuts that I create are automatically added into your Claude account, so then Claude can basically set those up for you.

And one of the things, again, I've been in this business for a very long time. I've built tons of different programs. One of the things that I love the most about this is that it is straightforward and to the point. You get in, you get out, because I know we're all busy. And then if you need support from me, it's available. But I just want people to take action. At the end of the day, that's what it's all about.

And what I was going to say, if automation is a focus in your business, definitely go and check out Steph's membership. I have been in there. She does a

21:00really good job of, like she said, not overwhelming you, but really giving you, "Here's what you can go do and implement and get a win this week."

Yes, exactly.

And Steph, tell folks about your gift, and then we're going to wrap it up.

Yeah, absolutely. So the gift that you're getting is my Steal My Claude Automations. A couple of the things that we talked about today, you can actually get those workflows inside of that. You can copy and paste those into your own Claude account and start implementing them right away. There's a total of four in there, and they're four of my favorite ones that I use literally every single day in my own business.

All right, folks. Thanks so much for joining us. And Steph, thanks for being here, too.

Yeah, thanks for having me. This was great.

Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you love the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day, and bye for now.

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284: Automate What Doesn't Need You
Destini Copp
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283: The AI Systems Creators Are Actually Running