# How to Manage an Automation Project (Account Set Up, Delivery, Etc)

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Nick Saraev
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVKYcbqlteo
- **Дата:** 07.03.2024
- **Длительность:** 27:31
- **Просмотры:** 12,991
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/12775

## Описание

In this vid I'll break down what you need to know in order to manage automation project logistics: like how to set up accounts to minimize killer issues (like 2FA), how to structure your service to easily upsell later on, and various techniques that I wish I knew when I first started doing consulting in the industry.

WATCH ME BUILD MY $300K/mo BUSINESS LIVE WITH DAILY VIDEOS ⤵️
https://www.youtube.com/@nicksaraevdaily

JOIN MY AUTOMATION COMMUNITY & GET YOUR FIRST CUSTOMER, GUARANTEED 👑
https://www.skool.com/makerschool/about?ref=e525fc95e7c346999dcec8e0e870e55d

1-ON-1 PAID CONSULTING ⤵️
https://intro.co/nicksaraev

NOTION DOC ⤵️
https://1secondcopy.notion.site/How-to-Manage-an-Automation-Project-Account-Set-Up-Logistics-Delivery-Etc-78faf1a66f31480ba92edea7b31bf421?pvs=4

WHAT TO WATCH NEXT 🍿
How I Hit $25K/Mo Selling Automation: https://youtube.com/watch?v=T7qAiuWDwLw
My $21K/Mo Make.com Proposal System: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UVLeX600irk
Generate Content Automatically With AI

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

hey everyone had a lot of requests recently for how to manage an automation project and when I say manage I mean account setup I mean delivery I mean Logistics I basically mean everything around the actual service that you're providing so if that sounds like something you want to improve on this is the video for you stay tuned okay as per usual I'm going to have a notion Link in the description it's going to include more or less a textual summary of everything I'm about to tell you I do very much prefer the video just because I get to visualize it and kind of walk you guys through hand in hand but yeah this video is more technical if you are running an Automation Services Company or if you're an automation freelancer or if these are things that you want to do at some point in the future definitely check this out to see how I solve these problems these are problems that I've heard from dozens maybe well over 50 other people that are running their own automation businesses by now both recently in YouTube and over the course of the last few years of my career so these are all problems that you are going to have to solve one way or another and there are many ways to solve these problem problems these are just the ways that I have chosen the ways that deliver me personally the highest Roi so first things first I'm going to cover account setup now ideally when you are getting a new make. com client or automation client whether it's on zapier n10 or any one of those other platforms you want the client to sign up using their own email and their own password what do I mean by that I mean you want them literally to go to make. com exit out of the cookies and then create an account right over here and then you want the client to use their name their email and then some password and as you can see you can do this whole thing pretty quick I mean from start to finish since I loaded the page maybe 10 seconds or so but you want to make sure the client does this on your own and there's a little bit of nuance here and some people are going to disagree with me on what I'm about to tell you but there are reasons for this now the first major problem with account setup that I see most people fall prey to is two Factor authentication if you are in automation two Factor authentication is one of the biggest Killers to both your credibility and your ability to get done and so we want to eliminate that however possible almost every single online service that you're going to sign up for now offers some variant of the sign up with Google or sign up with apple or I mean if we just go back to this make. com page I think there were four or five yeah Google Facebook GitHub these make it really convenient and really easy to get started on make. com or on any other software platform but they cause a huge pain in the ass for you and anybody else that's going to want to use those accounts in the future so you got to make sure that when your client signs up for your service they do so using their email and password not using one of these Services as I mentioned here nothing is going to kill your professionalism more than furiously texting a client at 11: p. m being like hey you just got a 2fa code can you send it back those sorts of things are not the impression that you want to be giving so as I mentioned uh two ways to solve this the first is you use your username and password or email and password and you force the client to do so I will usually do this over a call with the client but I'll get into my kickoff in a second the second option is in some cases you're working with a client who already has an account for a software platform whether it's make or something else and in those cases a lot of the time because of convenience clients will be signing up using those two Factor authentication services like Google or Facebook or GitHub if that happens I would highly recommend you guys to go in and change the login method to email and password and of course to explain this to the client uh to make sure that they're on the same page and to make sure they know how to log in the next time the great part about a lot of these Services is they allow you to do this so uh make. com for instance allows you to go in and then change your login method from Google to email and password you basically have to go in there and then unlink your account tons of other services do this as well pandadoc I'm pretty sure pipe Drive the vast majority of the time if a company or a software platform has an API integration it has this functionality built in because it knows that two- Factor authentication and ooth and stuff like that are problems but just make sure that you go through that if a client is using a platform that's really small like I have had a situation once where a client was using a new startup and the new startup had an API integration and had less than 100 users very tiny project probably making less than $500 a month but they were dead set on wanting to use that in those cases you sometimes you're just going to have to send an email to the developer or to the support staff and EXP L say hey can you unlink my account and then create a new account with username and password generate the username password send it over to me and then I can sign in and change it later sort of annoying you might add 24 hours to your turnaround time but if you don't do this it's going to haunt you and another really big issue with this which I'm going to get into in a second is it's going to negatively impact your ability to upsell the client later on because next time you're going to want to access their Suite of services or maybe next time you want to log in and do something for them which is usually how you get an upso you do something for somebody for free they like what they see they're like man this guy goes above

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

and beyond and then they want to work with you further you'll be blocked and you're not going to be able to do it so going to want to avoid it however humanly possible there are of course going to be some instances in which this is unavoidable specifically if a client is asking you to do a project on one of these platforms like Google like Facebook like Twitter or Instagram a lot of these platforms now have the ability to delegate access and this is something that most of them have now but not all of them so you're going to have to sort of go on these platforms and sus it out yourself if you want to be like an Instagram integrator or something but what I usually do to get around one of them the Google problem and Google is the most common platform that I work with is I'll actually ask the client hey just make me a Google workspace account and then make me an administrator so I'll actually send them the instructions to do so I'll make sure that they have everything they need and then usually they send it over to their it guy or their support or their developer and they do it for me that way I can then sign in on my own and then up to various services for them although in order for me to do that I am also going to need their credit card and stuff because I don't want to be involved in reimbursements it's a big pain in the ass so that's the first most important part about account setup just make sure you get your tofa sorted and if you do this at the beginning it'll save you so much headache later on the second thing that I want to talk about here is who owns the account and I want to frame this in terms of client best interest Now counter to what a lot of other people are going to tell you I recommend that you do not own the automation account if you're signing up to make. com or you're using zapier or something that means that the account isn't yours the account is the client's and instead of having maybe one or two big accounts where you have 10 or 15 clients under you I recommend that you just have a password manager and then just have 10 or 15 different client usernames and passwords in that password manager there are a couple reasons for this and I actually want to walk through my thought process in detail hopefully you guys will appreciate it and hopefully also just give you guys some more context about some of the pushes and pulls some of the factors at play here so the first is a big reason why people like when the client is on their account and nobody's going to tell you this because it makes them seem kind of evil but we're being pragmatic here it's business right if you can gain leverage over somebody you probably will and in some cases you probably should however a big reason why people want clients on their account is because owning all of the client systems is going to give you a ton of Leverage you are going to have an implicit threat essentially and that threat is going to be hey these systems run your entire business so if you don't pay me voila they're gone you can imagine how a lot of people that are earlyer on their career they structure their business this way because they're not confident that clients are going to pay them and I understand imagine that you're a client uh you are six months into your retainer you've been working with somebody for a while and maybe the quality of their service has gone down a little bit and so you're thinking man you know Nick just really isn't working out for me I kind of want to switch but if I do switch what if he just like takes away all of my systems a lot of the time if you're working with somebody for a retainer for a long period of time odds are they're making a little bit of money and your systems are probably helping them do that so essentially from a client POV it's not just hey is my service provider good now it's rid good and am I willing to take the disruption in service and continuity that letting that person go and maybe finding somebody else would entail am I willing to deal with him taking all 17 systems that he's painstakingly developed over the course of the last five months and generally just from my perspective that's not what you want to do and I'll touch on specifically why in a second but I always focus on longevity and reputation over the long term sure owning all client systems might make you a more money over the course of the next three months but year two years 5 years operating from that scarcity mindset for one is going to impact the way that you grow your business and are willing to reinvest and scale but two word gets around pretty quick the smaller that the niche is and if you're doing notion CRM setup there really aren't too many other people that are going to be doing exactly what you're doing if you want to be in that industry for the next five years get really good at it everybody's going to have to know your name at some point or at least hear your name and you just don't want that associated with Shady practices another big reason people like having clients on their account is because it just makes the initial friction setup process a lot easier I think especially for novice automation Specialists or developers this is just one of the most difficult and annoying processes because you sort of have to like hold the client's hand through signing up to these things and a lot of the time if somebody's looking for systems or automations a big use case or a big reason why is because they're just not very technical people and if they lack that technical skill and if they're really busy let's say they're just not really going to want to sign up to these platforms on their own and that's understandable however I would highly recommend that you do it regardless and you get the client to at least have some visibility into what these platforms are at least make it through the signup process and it's going to help you a lot later on and here's why if you give your client awareness of how the systems work it's a empowering they're not going to feel like you're like the gatekeeper into their business it's also going to let them peek into at the complexity of the systems that you're building for them and sort of have like a little bit more respect or maybe awareness of what's going on that's going to make you look more knowledgeable position you as more of an expert than you probably already are and then it's also going to improve the self-sufficiency of the

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00]

client they're going to know where they need to go how to navigate through these systems if you give them like a brief five-minute walkr like I always do and generally speaking they're just going to answer a lot of the stuff that they otherwise would ask you themselves and the self-sufficiency is fantastic because a common failure mode I see in a lot of these agencies that start off with a Freel as a freelance consultant and slowly try and grow is they end up essentially just being the glorified it guy for a company you're building the systems and then they start asking you similar but related questions to other software platforms or other things that you can do and then before you know you're just the end all Beall sort of thing you don't want clients like that because it's going to significantly impact your ability to scale the business it's much better to get clients that have a certain level of self-sufficiency and if they don't have that then to teach them that self-sufficiency by walking them through signing up these platforms the real benefit to all of this and the reason why I'm making this case is just because you can achieve everything that I mentioned below with like an additional 15 minutes in your kickoff call all I do is I actually call the client I'll jump on a kickoff and then I'll say hey it's time for us to sign up to these platforms we have three platforms we're signing up today why don't you share your screen and I'll walk you through how to do it very simple very easy process and it makes sure the client knows where all their data is they're self-sufficient they're empowered and they don't feel like you're blocking them or sort of own their ass lastly setting up on the client account makes it really easy to offboard later the reason why I bring this up is because sometimes you're just not going to like working with a client or want to continue doing services and sometimes the client isn't going to want to work with you there are also of course some situations in which the project is just over and maybe this is just the natural conclusion of your guys business relationship and that's okay to offboard a client when you own all of their systems it's usually a lot more involved because it involves taking these systems and then transort transporting them or porting them over or um you know downloading blueprints or whatever and attempting to upload them to another make workspace this is a massive pain in the ass and you don't want to do this keep in mind you're not going to do this super often if you're pretty good at what you do obviously but you're going to do this often enough that like having an extra couple of hours thrown in once or twice a month just not something you want to deal with better to make sure that the clients have their own keys to the castle and they can be responsible for you know fairing in or fairing out the goods okay great so that's everything on how to set up your account now I want to talk a little bit about the logistics of make so what do you do inside of make how do you organize make for highest results and how do you make sure that whatever you're doing is sustainable uh it doesn't sort of fall apart after you're done working with the client first thing that I'm going to say is if you do what I recommended above which is where you get the client to sign up to their platform for them using their username and password or email what you're probably going to do at least on make is you're probably going to get them on the $10 a month plan or maybe the $18 a month plan so if I just go here I think I can just go pricing let's see if that works yes that does work I'm a genius what you're going to do is you're probably going to get them on this core plan or this Pro Plan you're probably not going to get them on the teams plan just because there's no real need to get them on the teams plan if you've seen my previous videos you'll know that I don't really see any purpose to teams you'll probably get them on Pro or you're going to get them on core and the way that Pro or core works is because you don't have access to teams sort of your highest level way to uh build organization into the businesses through the scenario Builder and so the scenario Builder looks something like this is just one for my current company left click you see I've separated the folders here into one two three four or one two three basically no four and then I have an example builds folder and then a photography system folder just for one of the builds that I did recently now the way that I would actually encourage you guys to set this up on your own is I'd in three or maybe four folders for the client um I would do one for sales and marketing so basically everything responsible for customer acquisition because odds are you're going to be using similar platforms doing similar approaches and this is just a simple way to break it down so this is everything to do with getting new Revenue in and then have another folder for project management which is sort of just in my case I called it operations here but it' be much more Adept to call it project management and then I have another one for HR and so that's anything to do with hiring or Administration or you can even do payroll here if you want and then have one for other is just sort of a catall because sometimes you're going to have systems that just don't fall neatly into those categories the reason why I bring this up is because if you don't have that then you just have the big uncategorized folder your make will eventually just turn into a giant colossal cluster and you and your client will have no idea what's going on organization is one thing that I really wish that they built in a little bit more to the software platform it's also entirely possible that you're watching this in the near 2027 and they fixed all this stuff and they have some beautiful hierarchical folder organization if they do I'll eat my shoe uh but yeah just try and sort that out as quickly as possible another thing to do that most people forget is to turn off the warning or error email notifications the way that you do this in make I believe is you click up here to your profile oh maybe you go to organization

### Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) [15:00]

organization and then you go to you do not do that I have a strong feeling that I just uh recorded a whole video on like a whole make. com course and uh I don't even know where the hell the notification settings are okay great so they're up here basically you go to the bottom corner you click Pro profile and then go down to the specific organization or part of so you can see I'm part of a bunch of different organizations here so I have various organizational tabs you're probably only have your company though and what you want to do is you just want to select errors and warnings and just turn them both off at least while you're developing the project the reason for that is because while you're testing odds are you're going to be either making mistakes or you're just going to be running and rerunning the scenario a bunch of times sometimes you can run into API call limits and then if you do run into one of those API calls or there's some issue with your scenario that is like on but it's not really on you're just testing your client's going to get an email and uh it's going to start with warnings and then eventually it's going to say error and if you're a client you just started working with uh an automation contractor and all of a sudden within five minutes you're getting 10 emails a day being like hey error in this scenario warning in this scenario you're probably not going to think as highly of that person as you otherwise would so you just want to avoid that as much as possible for professionalism reasons once you're done with the project I would encourage you to come back here and then just check the errors back on I usually do not do warnings simply because I don't really think the warnings are as important and sometimes it's just API rate limits and stuff like that okay now where do you go from here last thing we need to do to organize our make. com account is we need to use a naming convention now in practice as I mentioned earlier make. com will always inevitably get disorganized as hell that's just how it is right now but you can at least saave that off a little bit with a simple naming convention you see I barely follow this for my own account which is sort of a bad habit ideally everything that I'm telling people to do in my client accounts which are rigorously organized I would do for myself but say lovey what we want to do is we want to use a nameing convention that's something like this trigger and then I usually do an arrow or something and then I do function so what that might be um let's do this is an example scenario that if you guys are watching my videos I made to analyze a an image from a Google sheet row so what I would do is uh search Google sheet daily and then analyze image in open Ai and send email that's how I would organize this I would have the name of the trigger up here you can add the scheduling if it's something that is run sort of on a clock as opposed to a web hook or something like that and then have like the function of the modules here and so in my case you know I'm searching this Google sheet maybe not daily maybe it's every 15 minutes I'm just going to say once you will never operate again Google sheet Mah and then we're feeding into open AI so I'm analyzing the image in open Ai and then I'm sending the email I'm not mentioning this parse Json module just because that's sort of like a it's like a technical thing doesn't really add any semantic value to what this thing is doing it's just something that I have to do in order to make the rest of the flow work another example here is you can use numbers and those specifically those are important in multi scenario flows where you have one scenario that maybe starts a flow and then it triggers another scenario in the second part third part I would always just use numbers so number one would be the first one number two would be the second one number three would be the third one pretty self-explanatory this is just an example saying one new error table row send email to client with proposal so do it that way you will next I want to talk a little bit about passwords are viously very important especially if you're allowing the client to set up and encouraging all of their accounts on their own you're inevitably going to run into issues where you just have a million in one password so how the hell do you deal with that well it's pretty simple you do have to use a password manager it is 2024 and a lot of people are still sort of unaware of how they work but basically there a couple of platforms out there like one pass and last pass and dash lane and basically the way that they work is they are sort of hubs where you can store any and every password that you use on a daily basis and then they will look at the URL the website that you're on and then if you're on a URL that is in the database here then they'll pull up the passwords just make it really easier for you to log into a service and so the way that I personally use my password manager is I will use one pass and then in one pass you have the ability to create a bunch of vaults and I basically have one Vault per client vault is almost like a folder and then every time I create a new client or a new client gets onboarded while on the call with them my initial kickoff call which is that start introductory they paid the thing they just want to get going chat um I will jump on that call with them and then as they are creating the accounts I'll confirm their username and password I'll add it into my one pass literally just right there in front of them and then I'll log in right behind them just to make sure that everything is right so that way I'm saving dozens of hours later where I'm not looking frantically for a username or password or maybe I need to wait or have them send it back to me or something like that and it's counter inally the older that I get the more I real realize that doing these things quickly is actually the lazier option uh sure you can pass

### Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00) [20:00]

it off as being more organized but I like to pass it off as just being more lazy in practice a lot of people will try and share these with the client I've never found that necessary I don't really think there's any added alpha or value in having the client have a link to the password manager or making them a user on the account I could see it maybe if you're in like a really big organization and you want the client to like create the things themselves but in practice there's a lot of there sort of like a pain in the ass because the client has to learn how to use these platforms you have to educate them on how password managers work better for you just to be responsible for all that stuff unless you're in a big agency speaking of big agencies if you are in big agencies this becomes 10 times more useful because now you're not the only one that has access to that password now anybody else in your team does so very quick very easy and obviously because they're part of your company you can train them really easily which is nice the next is how to test the project testing is one of those things man that I think that a lot of newbie developers just don't really do and I will give you probably one of the highest Roi lessons right now if you're running a make. com flow never deliver it until you've tested it from start to finish and what I mean by start to finish is I mean the very first module in whatever the flow is all the way up to the last module in the flow don't use any of those testing hacks that I showed you where maybe you put the trigger somewhere else instead of on the beginning if you're going to deliver it just make sure that on every function that you could possibly want your CRM build or leaden system or a project management system to do You' just tested it end to end prior to delivery with the client this does add a boatload of time it's not easy but it's something that you basically have to do if you want to be considered a professional and maximize your ability to get people on a retainer and upsell them later on because nothing in automation is going to ruin your credibility More Than A system that you're telling the client you can build for them that ends up not working the way that I pitch it here is it's like being a GC or general contractor and delivering a house and then the house just has 15 broken windows like who the hell is going to want to like come home to that right they're going to think that your service was trash so yeah your goal is to transition these clients for the most of you into a recurring retainer of some kind and then testing your flow if you view it from that perspective it's not just like some nerdy Dev thing that you have to do because you know I'm All against those nerdy Dev things that people like to do that don't actually add bottom line this is one of those things that has a really outsized Roi because you sort of bundle it into the client experience so if you're going to spend money on sales marketing spend time on testing because it's sort of like doing the same thing for you and then last but not least how exactly do we go and deliver the project well I got an awesome sop for you eventually you will be finished what a lot of people do which I think is a missed opportunity is they will just email the client and say they like done and then they'll just link like their make. com scenario or maybe they'll just be like hey it's your turn to test it give it a try the thing about systems and the glory of make. com is systems are extremely Visual and make. com is like super interpretable I mean just look at these modules we have the logo of the company we have a statement saying what it does and then if you click in you have a bunch of pretty interpretable headings here telling you what every field is responsible for and so because systems are inherently Visual and then make. com is really good at showing that off you might as well show that off as visually as possible the great opportunity to take advantage of here is videos so I will always record a video upon delivery and what I'll do is I'll actually just walk through the flow from start to finish to show them how it works and this is probably why a lot of people think I'm really good at doing these sorts of videos where I will show a flow and then I'll document it and talk about how it works because I actually do this as part of my job this is like my day-to-day it's what I do for a living testing and recording and delivering is so important to me and it's such a high Roi opportunity to improve the outcome of your future work with that person or maybe just in general that I've gotten pretty good at it and I'd encourage all of you guys to do that as well so yeah I would test it on your own run through the whole system from end to end as I mentioned just like you tested it earlier just do it on camera what I'll do after is I will usually just add the loom video because I'm using loom for all of this into an email template is just like hey blank you know had a lot of fun working on this project I recorded an in-depth video walking you through everything you need to know about our system that's going to do X Y and Z click this to find out I'll add a couple of extra lines just explaining maybe some textural things or some quirks the system that maybe we didn't anticipate that sort of deal and then at the end I will tell the client hey I want you to take as much time as you need to test the system on your end and the reason why I do that is because I basically just want it to be as transparent as possible and I want them to feel empowered to figure out how the system works without sort of me walking them through it I mean I've already recorded a video for Christ's sake right the idea is you just want the client uh to trust you but also to feel comfortable with verifying the quality of their system on their end and I find that leads to a just significantly longer business relationship than then just sort of like taking you at your word sort of deal so tell them like hey in order just to wrap the project all you need to do is test the system on your end make sure it works give me the thumbs up and then I'll send you over the other 50% for the delivery something like that in practice is usually uh

### Segment 6 (25:00 - 27:00) [25:00]

pretty streamlined flow there's another benefit sometimes your clients use software and Technology differently to you you're probably pretty good at Tech they probably aren't as good at Tech and so they have a lot of predispositions and assumptions baked into their world model that means that they're going to use your systems differently than you probably considered so in some situations that will dig up an edge case where your system won't work and kind of sucks that you're doing that upon the delivery but you can see it as another opportunity to just improve the air tightness of system make it last longer anyway what I will do after the client confirms the project and this is the last thing that I'll do and the last thing I'm going to talk about is once the client says Nick this is amazing I love you and I want to work with you for the rest of my life here's a million dollars they say that very often by the way I will record a second loom video and what I'll do in this video is I will redo all of the testing that I just did for the client which is usually like another 10 15 20 minutes sometimes half an hour but then I will record it as if I'm recording it for somebody on their team to be used as lifetime documentation so I'm no longer just recording this just for Peter my client I'm not he hey Peter here's how the system works what I'm doing is I'm saying hey in this video I'm going to run through how blank system works so that anybody in the blank organization can get up where uh can pick up where I've left off and clients freaking love this because what you're doing is you're showing sort of like your willingness to look a little bit ahead at maybe a potential future relationship between you and that client or just the client using system in day-to-day and solving a problem that they had that they didn't even realize that they had regarding maintenance and managing so very future thinking uh it's a very easy pitch to segue into upselling them on a project management system with documentation this is probably one of the most common things that I will do I will start off by building a one-off project I'll usually charge pretty modestly for it maybe between 3,000 to like $6,000 for something straightforward I'll build it out for them I'll do all of this if they don't have a project management system in the video where I'm pitching and delivering the client I will say documentation is one of the most important parts of any flow I'm more than happy to talk about building that out for you in the future they'll give me the thumbs up I'll then record their first documentation video and then I'll pitch them on a retainer afterwards uh and the conversion rate on that is pretty great assuming I didn't mess anything up royally during building of the system okay that's it from start to finish I hope you guys found that valuable if you guys got any future or further questions please do leave a comment down below I respond to basically all of them although it is starting to take me a little bit longer than usual otherwise like subscribe and I'll see you on the next video thanks so much