Improve Your Workflow Episode 08 with Brett Stone
matthew.barlocker
11 September 2019Brett Stone is the Managing Director at BSDA, a Digital Advertising & Marketing Agency.
Learn more about BSDA:
- BSDA: https://www.bsda.com.au/
- BSDA Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BSDAgency/
- BSDA Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebsdateam/
Products and software mentioned in the show:
- Trello: https://trello.com/en
- Instapage: https://instapage.com/
- Mailchimp: https://mailchimp.com/
- Postcards - https://designmodo.com/postcards/
- Canva - https://www.canva.com/
- eClincher: https://eclincher.com/
Brands mentioned in the show:
- Southeast Melbourne Phoenix: https://www.semphoenix.com.au
- Nike: https://www.nike.com
- Michael Jordan: https://www.nike.com/us/en_us/c/jordan
Transcript of Improve Your Workflow podcast with Brett Stone of BSDA
Voiceover:
Welcome to the 'Improve Your Workflow' Podcast, brought to you by Digital Pigeon.
Learn from other creative and media businesses about attracting more work, delivering projects efficiently, getting paid on time, and everything in between.
Paul Evans:
Hi there, and welcome to the 8th episode of Improve Your Workflow. My name is Paul Evans and I'm your host. The format for this show is really simple. I interview owners and managers of media, marketing, and creative businesses about their productivity and operations hacks as a way where we can all learn from each other and hopefully make our lives that little bit easier. Our guest today is Brett Stone of BSDA. Welcome to the show Brett.
Brett Stone:
Hey, how you going?
Paul Evans:
Good. Could you start with telling the listeners what you do and who you do it for?
Brett Stone:
Yeah, for sure. So I run a digital agency on the Mornington peninsula and we help small to medium sized businesses with getting the word out there, helping them increase either their education or their revenue through either workshops or working directly with them to deliver advertising and marketing for their target audience.
Paul Evans:
Yeah. Cool. Is there any particular industries or types of businesses that you enjoy working with?
Brett Stone:
Not really.
Obviously a lot of agencies tend to niche in certain areas, you know, they just look after wineries or they just look after bars and restaurants, that kind of thing. Our sort of niche I suppose is small to medium local businesses. So that's what we try to focus on. We'll leave the big boys to, to handle the big clients and we'll do what, for us, means the most, which is helping, like a local hairdresser would be able to go from just the owner and maybe a casual staff member to maybe having to increase the number of days that they work to one extra or something to accommodate for the new work or those kinds of things. Just helping the business be able to grow a little bit more, a bit more quickly. And that's what we enjoy as well. That's what we get a kick out of.
Paul Evans:
Yeah. Nice. All right, so what would you say is your number one productivity hack? Whether that could be around selling your services or how you deliver your work or get maybe something on the business side of things.
Brett Stone:
Yeah. Well I think, I suppose it's a little bit old school, but we've got a giant whiteboard in the office. What we do is we write, I've got a bit of philosophy, which is what we call what's next. So we can write on white board the name of our client, what we're currently working on, the due date and who's working on it. And then when that finishes or when we finish that task, the question that we have to ask ourselves is what's next? And so we'll replace what was there once we've done that task and put the new task up there. We continue to do that the whole time. And what that does is it just sort of keeps us accountable. That means that everybody in the office can see what we have to do next.
So if a client were to call and say, how's this going or how's that going? We can always look at the one place and find it. And I know there's some great online tools for that. Like you know, [Rack 00:03:13] is one that we're exploring at the moment. There's Trello, there's all kinds of things to kind of do it. But for us we've certainly found that a really good productivity hack is just everybody in the office being mindful of the workload and what's coming up. So yeah, to keep our clients informed.
Paul Evans:
Yeah, in front and center so everyone in the office can see it.
Brett Stone:
Yeah, exactly.
Paul Evans:
Yeah. Cool. All right, so in terms of technology, is there any tools that you use at the moment that you want to share with your listeners that help get the job done?
Brett Stone:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I literally just purchased a new Macbook and the reason that I sort of went with a custom one that had 256 storage and then 16 gig of ram. Because everything I do particularly is in the cloud. I'm literally sitting here with about 36 tabs open.
Paul Evans:
Sounds familiar.
Brett Stone:
You're like, everything's web based. So for me, everything that I use is very much software online available. And I would say that in terms of software, some of the go-tos for us are things like Instapage for creating landing pages for clients. We find that really cool. MailChimp for delivering the delivery of mail. We've just started testing a beta service at the moment called Postcards, which is used to build HTML, really sexy looking emails and that's some stuff that we just signed up yesterday, I think. Yesterday morning I signed up for it and we've sent the first test email out to sort of monitor how the audience responds to the new look.
Yep. So that's a good one. But realistically I spend so much time in the cloud with tools that I could probably spend the next 45 minutes, on all the different ones we use. But the standard stuff as well. Like Canva, we use every day for doing things like creating social media logos or banners and that kind of thing. So we're always using that. We use software called eClincher for scheduling social posts.
Paul Evans:
Okay. Never heard of that one.
Brett Stone:
They've got an advantage over a lot of the others because I've spent a bit of time looking at them and sort of comparing which services they offer. And eClincher is one of the few that includes Google my business, somewhere that you can post to. Posting to Google my business regularly increases your rank in Google.
Paul Evans:
And for your, I suspect, for your type of businesses. The small businesses, they often have a physical store or place, so yeah, ranking up that Google my business, that content. Google my business I should say is certainly makes a lot of sense.
Brett Stone:
Yeah, that's right.
Paul Evans:
Hmm. Okay. We're just going to take a few seconds now to hear from our sponsor.
Voiceover:
This episode is brought to you by Digital Pigeon. Digital Pigeon is the leading file sharing service for creative and media businesses that can't afford to miss deadlines with a focus on moving large files from A to B quickly and reliably. Digital Pigeon is the total you can count on where others fail to deliver. Try Digital Pigeon out for free today at www.digital pigeon.com/workflow for an extra long 90 day trial. Now back to the show.
Paul Evans:
Okay. If you could work with one brand that you don't already work with, who would that be and why?
Brett Stone:
I think I'm a lifetime basketball fanatic. So I think locally it would be great to work with the newest MBL team, the South East Melbourne Phoenix. I've always been an other Melbourne team supporter, so it would be great to just have an opportunity to work with them on something. If I think bigger than that, it would be great to work with a brand like Nike or Jordan at some point as well because I think it's one of those things where if you don't sort of think about those things or have dreams or goals for that kind of thing, whether you think it's realistic or not, it doesn't really matter. It's about sort of putting it out there and hoping that somehow the universe makes it happen.
Paul Evans:
Yeah. Cool. All right. And how do you go about solving problems that you don't know the answer to? So you can't say Google. Cause that's too obvious. But is there any like specific blogs that you frequently visit or anything like that?
Brett Stone:
I definitely find that there are some research tools for me are better than others. So I've certainly found Digital Marketer, I have some great stuff around tips or tricks, especially in their blog.
Paul Evans:
Digitalmarketer.Com, is it? Yeah, I know that one. Yep.
Brett Stone:
And HubSpot's got some great stuff too. So hubspot.Com, they're kind of places that I'll go to for all that. I get email, I suppose, prompts, it feels like half a dozen times a day sometimes. But I get regular emails from those guys, saying check out our latest blog about this. And obviously we make a habit of trying to stay at the front or understanding where all the new changes are. So it's good to read all that stuff. But I think there's some value in places like LinkedIn, especially reading from people that you follow.
And articles from people that you find interesting or brands that you're interested in?
Paul Evans:
Yeah.
Brett Stone:
For me in particular, I'm on part of a BNI group.
Paul Evans:
Okay.
Brett Stone:
I find that that there's a lot more experienced business owners in that group than me. So I'm probably considered a bit green by comparison to the rest of them. But I've still been able to share some great ideas and suggestions with some of the others in the room. But for me, that's probably my go to place.
Paul Evans:
Yeah, it's a good networking sort of group. Yeah.
Brett Stone:
Yeah. And just talking to other business owners as well, just sort of getting out of your own head a little bit is really helpful.
Paul Evans:
For sure. Absolutely. All right, so finally, where can our listeners connect with you?
Brett Stone:
So they can check us out on our website, which is BSDA.Com.au or on Facebook, Instagram, they can find BSDA, either on Facebook gets BSD Agency and on Instagram it's @theBSDAteam.
Paul Evans:
Fantastic. Thanks for being on the show, Brett.
Brett Stone:
My pleasure. Great to be here.
Paul Evans:
Fascinating conversation with Brett Stone there. What's next? I really liked that idea. Assuming someone knows what's coming up in their foreseeable future. For everyone in the team who is on the tools, adding simply what is next on the whiteboard sounds like a really interesting and effective idea. Well, thanks for listening, and until next time, keep on delivering.
Voiceover:
Thanks for listening to the Improve Your Workflow podcast. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave us a review on iTunes. Go to www.digital pigeon.com/reviewpodcast/ for more info and we'll add you into our monthly draw to win a Digital Pigeon t-shirt. Bye for now.
Listen on
