Stop scrambling and just auto prep your meetings

Running a business has many moving parts. The more you can automate, the more it frees you up to address higher level and strategic problems of your business. This is a newsletter about automating aspects of your business.

Story and Problem

I have Zaps for automatically adding new customers (who purchase books
from my online shop) to my email list, and I specify which tags to add
to them depending on the product they buy. I have a Zap for creating a
new meeting notes document (from a template) for consulting clients in a
Google Drive folder as soon as they book a coaching call with me on
Calendly, and I'm working on a Zap to remove subscribers from my list
the moment they unsubscribe. I'm still in the process of building out
workflows but I'm really happy with how it automates several tedious
tasks.

Stephanie Morillo is the creator of The Developer's Guide to Content Creation, a book featuring exercises, worksheets, and content helping developers become better content creators.

She was the main writer for Bundler and RubyGems open source projects, the editor-in-chief of DigitalOcean and GitHub's company blogs, as well as a content strategist on Microsoft's Cloud Advocate team.

In addition to her book, she also sells a complementary service where she does 1 on 1 chats for people looking for more in-depth consultation. Here, she's automated the process of setting up the required notes and documents in preparation for the consultation as soon as a client books her on her Calendly.

Do you have recurring meetings where the format is the same? Maybe it's a sale call, or maybe it's a consulting call, where you find that you need to have certain source material, notes, or answers to commonly asked questions.

Instead of scrambling every time, set up some automation up front, triggered by your Calendly appointment to have every thing you need to be successful in your meetings every time. You'll still need to do any rehearsing, but let these logistics be the least of your worries!

Automation

Calendly easily integrates into a lot of major workflow management software like Integromat or Zapier. Use it to trigger

• adding links to zoom meetings in your Google Calendar
• the creation of template documents for the meeting
• add links answers to commonly asked questions
• numbers and figures that you need to know on these calls.
• or anything else you find you're usually scrambling for.

For any of these documents, if you do link them in the event, and that event is shared by your counterpart in your meeting, make sure the default permissions is only you! Otherwise, it might get real embarrassing!

As usual, these are just the tools I've heard of and used before. If you like to find alternatives, here are a couple below.

• Zapier Alternatives
• Calendly Alternatives

Happy Automating! Make your meetings a success!

[*] Photo by Vlada Karpovich