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- So most likely the reason that you're here is because you're trying to understand how to get started in Dubsado, you're brand new or you've had it maybe for a little while and you're just trying to get that ball rolling within Dubsado. So that's what we're gonna be covering today is just getting started, some different tools that you can use to start getting that ball rolling and get the momentum going. And also the reason that I wanna do this webinar is to give you guys a big picture of where you're headed. Sometimes when you jump into any platform or you get into Dubsado and you're wondering where do I start, it also helps to know what the big picture is. So understanding what is it that I'm actually looking to do in Dubsado, what does the finished product look like, what am I headed towards. So we're also gonna talk about that as well so that it can give you some inspiration, some motivation to jump in and get started and start getting everything set up. So let me go ahead and share my screen and we will get started here. Pull this up. Perfect, so you should be able to see the outline. And again for those of you guys who are joining us, there is an outline that you can download. So go ahead and download that and you can follow along if you would like to. And so we'll jump in and get started here. So the first thing we're gonna talk about is the big picture. So any time that you're trying to build something or you have a goal for yourself that you wanna put your business into this or if it's the gym and you wanna get in shape, you always wanna know what the big picture is. What is it that I'm headed towards? And so I wanna start out with that so you can get an idea and you can see what a healthy Dubsado account looks like or what a great Dubsado account looks like that you can work towards. And everybody's business is different. So the big picture can look a little bit differently from everybody, but there are some macro level things that every business owner can resemble whenever we're talking about a full Dubsado account that's set up. So the first thing that we're going to do is just lay out what is it that I'm trying to get to in Dubsado. The goal with Dubsado is to get your business process, which is your workflows and we'll talk about that, too, is to get your business process into Dubsado and be able to confidently manage your clients within the platform. And we're really talking about the projects page there. So that's what your goal is with Dubsado is whatever your business process is, no matter how small it is, how simple it is, how complex it is, how big it is, the goal is to get that into Dubsado, the things that you normally do with your clients, get that into Dubsado and then have the confidence to be able to manage them once you start getting new clients in. That's the entire goal of Dubsado. And we have features and tools that can let you accomplish that. So let's talk here about what that actually looks like in the system. So I'm gonna jump over to my account here. And we're gonna talk about the projects page and we'll go over a few things here, but we have a section later in this webinar that goes over the details of this. But what is your business process? Your business process is what you do with a client. So if you send out emails to a client like welcome emails or you send out quotes to clients or questionnaires, you have your client sign contracts, there's tasks that you need to get done, all of those different things that make up what you do with a client, the goal is to get that into Dubsado by way of a workflow. Now, I just wanna preface especially for new users coming in, workflows are going to be one of the very last things you set up in Dubsado. And I'll go into some detail about that in this webinar. But workflows is the very last step that you'll set up and then you'll go live with your business inside of Dubsado. And we'll talk through how you can think about getting to workflows, but like the ultimate goal, your end goal is to get that workflow set up. So let's take a look at a workflow here so you can have at least a visual and understand what that's going to look like. So if I go to templates here, right here on the left-hand side, this is gonna be the menu that have a lot of the bigger features within Dubsado, but underneath templates, this is going to be where you'll build all of your content in Dubsado. So if we go down to workflow and we'll click on this. And I'm just gonna pull up one that I have in the system here. What your workflow is like I said is it's your business process, so the things that you send out to your client. And what I want you to gain from just seeing this is this is eventually what you're going to build in the system are your step-by-step actions that you do with a client. So if you send an email and then you send out a questionnaire to the client to gauge more information, then maybe you send out a contract to have them signed and then pay. Whatever that flow is that you have with your client, that's what you're eventually going to get into the system and build as a workflow. That's the ultimate goal. Now, if you're brand new to business, that's totally fine if you don't have a business process yet. We're gonna talk about what you can do in the system and some of the things that you have available to you so that you can start to develop a business process. So if you do have a business process coming in, the goal is to take that what you're doing right now, maybe have some tweaks, but you wanna fit it into Dubsado's system so that it works for you effectively. So a workflow just the plain version of it or the basic version of it is it's your business process. It's the action steps that you take with your client and you're going to end up building that into the system. So now that you have an understanding of what it is that you're working towards, let's talk about the projects page here. So the projects page in Dubsado, we talked about templates first, the projects page in Dubsado... And we'll let my computer load here. The projects page in Dubsado is going to be where you manage all of your clients. So anybody who comes into the system, this is going to be where you do all of your communication and managing of all of your clients. So like I said in the very beginning, what the goal is with Dubsado is to have a workflow that's set up and that you can come into your projects page here and you can confidently manage your clients within this page. That's what your goal is. And if you feel like if you are farther along in your business or you're father along in your Dubsado journey, if you feel like you're at that point, then that's where we want you to be at, that you have workflow set up and that you can confidently manage your projects page. And my colleague, Sam, is actually going to be doing a webinar on Tuesday the 17th to go over how to organize your projects page. So I won't go into too much detail today as to how to organize it properly. But that webinar's gonna be very insightful to help you guys out with organizing your projects page so that it works for your business. But we'll get into a little bit of the details of the projects page here in just a little bit. But I did wanna show you guys an overall goal that you're going to have a projects page that you can come into and you can confidently manage your clients in here. So that's number one is the big picture, have a business process in Dubsado and confidently manage your clients. Number two, let's talk about just some of the basics now. So when you get into Dubsado, what's some of the first things that you should set up? What we normally recommend getting set up first are what we call the essential brand settings. There's a lot of different settings that you can set up in Dubsado, but there's three in particular that we think are very vital to getting set up at a foundational level. And so we're gonna talk about those next. So number one, we'll go to the brand settings here. So if we go to Dubsado and we'll go to the settings up here. It's the little gear icon at the top and we'll click that. So when we click on the gear icon, this is gonna take you to your settings page. Now, if you set up a social media account, if you're on another software, there's usually a profile that you'll set up or an account settings that you'll set up, that's what this page is in Dubsado. It's your account settings or your brand settings. So right underneath here, you'll see a list of the different tabs that you can go through and get set up. Now, I'm not gonna cover all of these today because I just wanna help you guys get started in the system. So there's three, well, there's two on this page and then one that's in the calendar, but we're gonna talk about the essential brand settings. These are the things that are very, very important for you to set up when you first get into the system. The first one is going to be the receive money tab right here. We'll click on receive money. And this page right here is gonna be where you set up your payment processor. Now, Dubsado links up with three different payment processors. We link up with Stripe, Square and PayPal. And these are the three processors that once you invoice a client, it will go directly into that account. These are the only three that we have. We do offer credit card payments, we do offer ACH payments. And so you can link up your Dubsado brand to one of these three. There are ways that if you do accept payment a different way like cash, check, Venmo, Cash App, anything like that, there are ways that you can manually apply a payment to an invoice, but as far as automatically applying a payment to an invoice or having them pay directly through an invoice, these are the three different payment processors that we have and we have a lot of information on that in our help center. And then so receive money, very important. Go ahead and get your payment processor set up there so that you can start receiving money in the system. Email, so right underneath receive money is the emails tab. This is going to be where you can set up your outgoing/incoming email. What that means is that when you start sending emails to clients, so you're sending contracts or welcome emails, you're sending invoices to the client, the email that you set up here is going to be the email that all of that content comes from. So you wanna make sure that this is your business email. Whatever you want the email to be that when a client receives an email and says, oh, I'm getting this email from this company or this brand, that's gonna be what you set up here. Now, if you have a Gmail, it's really easy to set up. You can just click sign in with Google there and then you can link up your Gmail. If you click use SMTP, this will give you the ability to set up an email that's not affiliated with Google. So if we click on use SMTP, it will ask who your email provider is and then it will give you some other options here. So we have Outlook, Hotmail, iCloud, Yahoo, AOL. If you have your email address through your web host, like Bluehost or something like that, then other is gonna be the option that you'll use there. But the main thing that you'll wanna do here is to get your email set up because if you don't get your email set up here, when you start invoicing clients, sending them contracts and all of that, it's gonna be coming from mail@dubsado.com and it will most likely go to their spam. So you wanna make sure that you have your actual email set up here so that way when you do start emailing clients, it's coming from your email. And currently right now in the system and we are working on this, but currently right now in the system, you're only able to have one email per brand. So this email that you set up here should be an email that you're comfortable sending all of your emails out from Dubsado. But like I said, our development team is working on that to where you can have multiple email addresses that you can use within the system. So that is a very important place, so receive money and emails. And then the next thing for brand settings is underneath the calendar. So if we click on calendar and it'll take us to our calendar page and we go up to calendar settings and we'll click there. And then sync calendar. If you would like an external calendar to be synced up to Dubsado so that you can export things out to that calendar or import things in like dentists appointments, vacations, anything that's a personal appointment or anything like that, you can sync up your external calendar here and then you can choose if you want to import and, or export out to that calendar. So those are the three things that we always encourage you to get set up first. We call those the essential brand settings. You can always go into the settings and look through some of the other ones and set all of that up, but at the very beginning just at least to get started, set up your payment processor, your emails and your calendar. Those three things are vital. So that way you can get that baseline and that foundation set up. So that's gonna be the essential brand settings. The next thing is we're gonna go back to the projects page and we're gonna break down the projects page so you understand how you're going to manage clients when you get them in the system. So we're gonna talk about projects, clients, leads and jobs and how all of those tie in together. So if we go back to the projects page now, how Dubsado functions is that it's all based off of projects that you have set up. Now, we understand that not every industry functions with the language of projects, but how you can think about a project is it's like a client folder. So let's say that you have a file cabinet with a client's name on it. A folder that you have in there, let's say you're doing a wedding, that's what a project is going to be is like the client folder. It has the contracts in there, the forms, invoices, workflows, run through projects, tasks that you need to get done. Those are in the projects. So what you can think about the project is it's the communication hub for how you're going to speak with your clients. Everything that you're going to communicate with them is sending contracts, emails, it all flows through a project. So if you don't like the term projects, just think about it as a client folder. And that way you can have a lot of different pieces of information in there and that's going to be how you'll communicate with that client. So as you can see here, I have three projects set up. And each project has a client attached to it. So the very first one I have up here is Becca. And so Becca right now she's wanting to do a rebranding project with me or I'm gonna be working with her for rebranding. So how clients work in this system is the client is going to be the main person that you're communicating with when you're doing all of your emailing. So you can have a primary client on that project, you can have an alternate contact if you would like to, but the primary client is going to be who you're communicating with. So as you can see here, I have my primary client for each one of these projects. It's also important to know that each client can have multiple projects. So let's say that Becca comes back to me a year later and says, hey, I'd actually like to do further work with you. What you can do is you could set up a new project or a new folder for Becca and she would essentially have two folders or two projects underneath her name. So that's how you can think about projects and clients is that each project has to have a client assigned to it and each client could have multiple projects, but the project is gonna be how you communicate with that client. So let's do this, let's click into Becca's project here and let's talk about the inside of a project. So inside here, this is like I said gonna be your project dashboard. It's gonna be where you do all your communication. So we have an emails tab where you can email the client from within the project, an invoices tab where you can invoice the client. If you're wanting to send forms, you can send forms out to the client from this tab. Any appointments that you have with them, those are also located within here. We talked about workflows. Workflows also run through projects. So what we showed in the very beginning, the workflow here is going to run inside of the project. So as you can see here, the project is really that communication hub, that central area where everything is gonna be taking place. So if you have tasks that you need to get done, notes that you need to take about that project, it all functions and flows through the project. And as long as you can understand that phrasing of how the projects work, that's what we'll need whenever you're managing your clients. So as you can see, I have a few projects set up here. And now let's talk about the status of these projects. Up at the top, you'll see two pockets. You'll see the leads area and you'll see the jobs area. Now, the reason why the projects page is gonna be where you manage everybody is because it doesn't matter if it's someone who's not booked with you or if it's someone who is booked with you, everybody's going to be in this projects area. Leads are going to be people who are not working with you yet. So they've inquired, maybe you've sent them out pricing, you've spoken with them, you've done a consultation with them, but you can keep all of your leads. If I click over on the leads area over here, these are all of the people that haven't confirmed with me yet. So you can space out and you can separate your leads from your jobs. And jobs are gonna be the people who have booked with you. So as you can see here, they've signed contracts with me or they've made deposits or payments. And they also have the workflows running and all of that. So that's gonna be how you can separate those two and we call those statuses. What's the status of this job? Is it more in the lead status, it's in that section of your business process? Or is it in the jobs area where it's they've signed with you, they've paid, you know they're locked in? And you can change the status over here on the right-hand side. If you wanna switch them from a lead to a job, there's also a way to automate that with workflows. But that's just a baseline. You have a project that has a client and those two go together and then you can determine the status of that project. Is it more in the lead phase or is it more on the job phase? And that way on this page, you have everybody organized and then you can clearly see this is who I'm working with, these are the leads that I have coming in. And so those are the four different terms that will really help you navigate your projects page. And like I said, my colleague, Sam, is gonna be doing a full webinar on how to organize this the correct way. So definitely make sure, too, to sign up for that. And so we have projects, clients, leads and jobs. Now, the next thing I'm gonna talk about is now what do you do once you understand the projects. Now what's my next step after I understand that concept? So the next thing you're going to do is you're going to, or we're going to talk about is the lead capture form. So if we go back here and we're gonna go underneath templates. And remember, templates is going to be where all of your content is built. And we'll talk about a few more pieces of content in here, but the one I wanna draw your attention to first because if the goal is to get your workflow into the system and running inside of a project, how does that all start? Where do I start with workflows? If it's the last thing I set up, then how do I get started? So let's talk about getting workflows at least developing a blueprint for them. And so that way you can understand how you're gonna go about doing that. So if we go to the forms tab here and we're gonna go to one of the lead capture forms. So the forms section is gonna be where all of your master templates live, so contracts, sub agreements, questionnaires. We'll talk about a few more of these in a little bit. But the lead capture form here on the right-hand side, this is going to be where you create the ability for workflows to begin in projects. So if I go to one of these lead capture forms, what this is designed to do is to take somebody and get them into Dubsado. So you can take this form and you can embed it on your website, you can send it out to a client and when they fill this form out, and you can customize this how you would like to, ask the questions that you would typically ask on a contact form, you can take that and bring it into Dubsado here and develop your own contact form. And once someone fills this form out, what happens is they get created as a new project underneath that lead section. So we just talked about how the projects are organized, this form once someone fills it out, you'll see a new project generate underneath that leads area. So this actually brings them into the system. So once you have your projects page set up here, or sorry, your projects page, your lead capture form set up here, the next thing you can do and that I'll cover here really quickly is the ability to share this form. So if you click the share button up here, it gives you two different ways that you can share this form. The first one is going to be the iFrame code here. And this is where you can copy and paste this form into your web builder and it's going to embed it on your website. The other thing that you can do is you can take this direct link and you can send it out to somebody. So if you wanna put this on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn or if you wanna text it to somebody, you can send this direct link to anybody and then once they fill the form out, they'll get created as a new project. So that's gonna be how you can share this form. Now, how do workflows come into play? So with the workflows, workflows can begin from this form. So there's two ways that you can get workflows to kick off from this form 'cause the goal is for someone to fill out the form, get created as a project and then have that workflow, your business process then begin within that project. So if we click on the settings gear up here at the top, so this is the settings menu for your lead capture, the first thing you can do is apply a default workflow to start. This just means that once you have your workflow template built, you can add a workflow to this lead capture. So whatever workflow you add to this form, that's gonna be the workflow that starts in their project every single time. So if you're in a business that the exact same process starts for everybody, you can just apply a default workflow and then the system will recognize what workflow you have added here in this drop-down and it's just gonna stick it onto that project and then your process is gonna start running. So it'll send out a welcome email and then if you have a questionnaire is the next thing that goes out, it will do all of that. So the default workflow is more for the business types that have the exact same process that starts for everybody. The other thing that you can do to get workflows to start is you can add a workflow element over here on the right-hand side. You can add that to your form to provide a little bit of diversity on which workflow is going to start. And I have one on this form already. It's right here, it says what type of event are you having. What this does is it gives you the ability to qualify your client or your lead and qualify them and figure out what they're actually interested in and based off of their interest, then you can have a different workflow apply. So this is where you can get some diversity of I don't have the exact same process for everybody. It depends what they're interested in. And so as you can see here, if I'm more in the photography realm, I have are you interested in portraits, family sessions, is it a sporting event that you want me to shoot, an engagement session? So here I can start to get some discrepancy on which one I want to start. So what I would end up doing is I would have a portraits workflow, I would have a family workflow or a sporting events workflow. And by doing this, this gives you your blueprint or your framework for how you're going to go about the system now. So if workflows is the end goal and you wanna have a healthy workflow, a full-built workflow, you need to know what is the game plan. What's my blueprint for building this workflow? So this area right here is where you can create that blueprint. So one thing we really recommend is understanding how your workflows are going to eventually run because a lot of people that we've talked to, the first thing they do when they jump into Dubsado is they go in and they start building workflows and then realize later that you have the ability to do this. So then they have to go in and change all their workflows around. So what we recommend doing is develop your blueprint first. Understand the game plan or what you're going to do when you build these workflows. So how you can think about it is they're gonna be filling out this lead capture, whether it's on your website, whether you're sending it to somebody. And then they can go in and they can say I'm interested in portraits. Well now, what happens when they click portraits? Now you're gonna start to build your framework for if they click portraits, I want them to get a welcome email and then I have a certain questionnaire I need them to fill out. You can start to see how your process is going to develop just from understanding how it starts on this form. So that's one thing I always like to cover when you're first getting started is understand how your workflows are going to work first before going in and building them. Get your game plan set up and that way you have a very clear idea of this is how I want to build my workflows because it's all based off of how they're coming into the system. So very important there. And then the next thing here is to now go in and build your content. So once you understand the different services or the different lanes that you want them to go down, now it's time to go in and start to build some content that you know you're going to need. Now, with Dubsado, underneath the template section here, remember the templates is gonna be especially if you're brand new, you're gonna be spending a lot of time just understanding the different types of templates we have, what they can do, building your content. So right now, you're just getting all of that content together for your workflow 'cause if you're gonna send out an email in your workflow like a welcome email, you wanna make sure that it's built in the system. So just a quick rundown, we have a ton of different pieces of content, but just to let you know with the forms here, we have contracts that clients can sign, sub agreements which are more like waivers, questionnaires that the client can fill out to gauge more information from the client. Your proposals are going to be more of like order forms where you can have clients pick packages or you can show clients your scope of work. I'm actually gonna be doing a proposal webinar in two weeks that goes over everything that has to do with proposals. So you can start to develop your different form templates. Some of you who are in business, you already know that you have a contract you need to build, you might have questionnaires that you already know you need to have in there. So go through and start to build out your forms. Canned emails, so right underneath forms is canned emails. Canned emails are gonna be a place where you can put email drafts that you normally are always sending out to clients, so payment reminders, follow ups, welcome emails, please book a call with me consultation reminders, all of those emails that you're constantly sending out to clients. You can build all of those in canned emails here so that you can use those for workflows and you don't have to retype the exact same email over and over again with the same client. So canned emails are very important. Packages, packages are going to be a place where you can take your services and products and you can put them in Dubsado so that you can put them on invoices, you can offer those to clients on your proposals. So packages, anything that you have that has a price point attached to it, you can put it in the system here. You can build it as a package. And that way if you have add-ons, if you have just regular services or products, different things like that, like bronze, silver, gold, different things, you can build all of that in here and then put those on invoices and offer those to clients. And so what you're going to do is you'll go through and you're going to start to build that content, experiment with some different forms and understand what they do. And then the very last thing that we'll talk about here today before we open it up for questions with just getting started in the system is getting familiar with Dubsado. Even though the workflows is the shiny tool that we have and it's the thing that can streamline and automate your business, you always wanna make sure you're comfortable with Dubsado first because if you're not familiar with Dubsado, if you're not comfortable with how it works and understanding how to send a form or if I'm gonna send a contract out to a client, how do I do that, you're basically going to program the knowledge of Dubsado that you have into a workflow. So the more knowledge you know about how Dubsado works, the greater your workflow can be. So one thing that we always recommend when you're getting started is just be patient and just learn how Dubsado works. There's a lot to the system, but you can take your time and understand the different pieces. Understand how contracts work or questionnaires because the more familiar and confident you get with using Dubsado, then your workflows will be a representation of how much you know in the system. So set up some test projects and we have a whole webinar in our YouTube channel about testing out your workflows, testing out your processes and different things that you can do there, but set up some test projects, make yourself a client, send yourself some emails, get familiar with how the system works. One thing that I do like to tell people is it's okay to set up test projects and not send a form the right way or end up getting an error message. There's nothing wrong with that. You want to get those kind of little bumps and bruises along the way because then once you get all of that together and you understand how Dubsado works, then your workflows like I said will be a representation of how much you know in the system.