Ep 312 | Setting up Task Automations for Increased Productivity with Karen King

Are you feeling overwhelmed by your nonprofit's workload? In this episode, I sit down with Karen King, founder of Gold Star Pro, to explore how automation can revolutionize your organization's productivity and give you back precious time to focus on your mission.

Embracing Automation Without Losing the Human Touch

Karen shares valuable insights on:

• Why automation doesn't mean depersonalization
• How to create personalized experiences at scale
• Balancing efficiency with authenticity in your communications

Streamlining Your Nonprofit's Processes

Discover practical strategies for:

• Identifying tasks that can be automated
• Creating a roadmap for implementing automation
• Leveraging data to make informed decisions

Overcoming Common Automation Hurdles

We address key concerns, including:

• Maintaining consistency in your messaging
• Ensuring quality control in automated processes
• Freeing up time for strategic thinking and creativity

Getting Started with Automation

Learn how to:

• Map out your current processes
• Identify areas for improvement
• Choose the right tools for your organization's needs

Whether you're a small grassroots organization or an established nonprofit, this conversation offers fresh perspectives on how to work smarter, not harder. Don't miss this opportunity to explore strategies that could transform your approach to productivity and impact.

Want to skip ahead? Here are some key takeaways:

06:28 Mapping Your Processes Learn why creating a roadmap is crucial before implementing any automation tools.

12:47 Personalization in Automation Discover how to maintain a human touch while leveraging technology for efficiency.

19:36 Data-Driven Decision Making Explore how automation can provide valuable insights to guide your strategy.

26:15 Consistency and Trust-Building Understand how automation can help you maintain a consistent presence and build trust with your audience.

Don't let burnout hold your nonprofit back. Tune in to learn how automation can help you create more impact while reclaiming your time and energy.

Resources

Worldschooling Central: A community founded by Karen King, helping families educate their children through travel.

The Escapepreneur: Another program by Karen King, teaching entrepreneurs how to design businesses that fund their ideal lifestyle.

Full Transcript

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] We've talked a lot about AI and automations as it relates to your marketing and content creation, but we haven't talked about it in a while as it relates to your productivity for your team and how you can get more done in everything, all areas of your organization. And so that is what we are going to talk about today. My guest today is Karen King. She is a visionary entrepreneur, world traveler and founder of Goldstar Pro, a platform and coaching program designed to help solopreneurs and coaches build scalable location independent businesses. With over a decade of experience in technology coaching and marketing, Karen specializes in simplifying business automation so her clients can focus on creating freedom, not just revenues. After leaving corporate burnout behind, Karen sold everything to travel the world with her family, embracing a world schooling lifestyle for nearly a decade. This journey inspired her to launch Worldschooling Central, a 13,000 member community helping families educate their children through business, business or through travel. Now she merges her experience in business automation with her passion for freedom through the EscapePreneur movement, a program teaching entrepreneurs how to design businesses that fund their ideal lifestyles. Burnout in the nonprofit space is huge and you know, just working and grinding and doing things for hours and hours and hours doesn't work anymore. We need to have better systems, better things in place for not just us but our team and opportunities for us to live and balance where what we're doing in our personal and work life and feel good about what we're doing. And so that is exactly what Karen and I talk about today and it was such a fun conversation so I'm excited for you to check it out. But before we do, this episode is brought to you by Oh My Hi. Oh My Hi is a website building platform that is great for you if you want something that is clean, looks great, easy to use and doesn't overcomplicate anything. You can still embed your donation forms and all the things that you need there and they have trusty team members who can train you and work with you throughout your entire process. They have live Q&As every week where you can go in and actually have somebody show you how to fix, update or tweak what you have in your mind. It is a great platform and I'm obsessed with it. In fact they have a nonprofit template that I helped them create so you can check it out at thefirstclick.net/ohmyhi that's H I. And check out a great interview I did with Oh My Hi co-founder Becky Launder where she talks about websites the purpose and why oh my high and who oh my high is perfect for. So hope you check it out. It's a great platform and can really remove the stress and pressure of a super crazy build. Expensive and with no training for you to update on your own. Again, that's at thefirstclick.net/ohmyhi let's get into the episode.

You're listening to the Digital Marketing Therapy podcast. I'm your host, Sami Bedell Mulhern. Each month, we dive deep into a digital marketing or fundraising strategy that you can implement in your organization. Each week, you'll hear from guest experts, nonprofits, and myself on best practices, tips and resources to help you raise more money online and reach your organizational goals.

Hey, friends, Please join me in welcoming Karen King to the podcast. Karen, thanks for being here.

[Karen King] Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] So I love organization task management because it permeates through everything that we do all day, every day. Why is kind of streamlining our days being more efficient, working smarter, not harder? Why is that something that you love and love to coach on?

[Karen King] Well, it's funny, I've been traveling the world now for the last 10 years. We sold everything in Australia 10 years ago and started traveling the world. And when I was trying to launch a business, I realized that I was spending a lot of time stuck at my laptop doing the mundane stuff that we all have to do, like it has to be done. But when I discovered automation, I realized it didn't have to be me that did it. I'd much rather be out exploring the world and hanging out with my family or my friends or whatever the case may be than stuck at my laptop. So that's really where it started from. Just, you know, I guess I always tell people I must just be inherently lazy or something. Either that or really smart.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] No, but I. Okay, so I love that you said that because I think that for a lot of us, it's ingrained that busy equals success or busy equals, you know, movement and trajectory. Like, we're doing things in our business, if we're not busy, then we're not doing enough. So I just kind of love your thoughts on that. Like, what was that like for you as you kind of started automating things and freeing up time and space? Like, how did you allow yourself to take advantage of that space versus, like, fill it with more busy?

[Karen King] Well, that's a really good question because I'm very guilty of filling it with more busy. And it's something that I struggle with because I love what I do. I very, very easily can find other things to fill that with. But what it has allowed me to do is pick and choose what I put in that space. So last week, for example, we were celebrating a big birthday with my daughter, and I needed a couple of days to help set things up and prepare. And because things were automated, I didn't have to be the one there doing it. The business just kept operating. Of course, I check in and make sure that everything's okay. But what it does is it gives you that flexibility to choose what you do. But, yeah, you know, as entrepreneurs, we always have a lot of ideas and, you know, we're always coming up with new and wonderful things. So, yes, we have to be really careful that we don't build that space. When. When I. On the times where I've really lent into that, what I have discovered is that the business runs really well without me. And quite often I actually make a lot more money. So I don't know. So, yeah, as I said, we travel the world full time. Last winter, we spent every Monday, Wednesday, Friday morning, I blocked out to go skiing. And I made more money over those couple of months when I wasn't doing the busy work than when I was. So it was an interesting experiment.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Oh, my gosh, I love that so much. Well, okay, so let's jump over one other hurdle really quick before we jump into some specific strategies and tactics. Being I'm hearing automation automatically, I'm thinking depersonalized. I'm thinking, you know, my people are going to know that it's not me or like, all the things are going to go off the rails, things are going to break. All of these things when we're in the nonprofit space and, you know, we're small teams and, you know, we want to make sure that everything is still authentic and connected. And, you know, there's just this fear of it's not going to work. And you already said you made more money when you weren't doing it, and that's great in the entrepreneur for profit space. But, like, can you kind of share some of the reasons why we might want to stop thinking about it as a depersonalization and as more of an opportunity for us to actually be more personal with our connections and our audience?

[Karen King] Absolutely. And it is one thing that I hear all the time, and people think it's going to be cold or like you said, just not personalized. The thing you have to remember is this is about replacing the need for you physically doing it. That doesn't mean it needs to sound robotic, for example. So when you're setting up an email, you're writing that email to one person. So you're doing it as you would automatically or ordinarily, but then you're taking that email and putting it into a system. So that wonderful customization, that personalization that you would do yourself for one person then goes out and becomes that for everybody without you doing it. So I always tell all of the people that I work with, I always tell them, build your system for that one person. What would be the most amazing process that you could create for that one person? Create that. And then you start pushing other people into it. And then you don't run the risk of oh, you know, I forgot to send such an email, you know, I've got to do this. Whatever the case may be, you're actually using that personalization that you've created and doing it more consistently again without you having to be involved. It's actually quite incredible how personalized automation can be when you do it that way. I regularly get people right back to my automated emails saying, oh, thank you so much, it's so sweet of you to respond to me because I've written the automation in the first place aimed at one person, they respond to me and then that starts a conversation. That's when you can step in and continue that conversation and be very personalized. But it just takes you out of the repetitive stuff that you need to do every single day.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Well, I think there's something really important that you said there that I want to make sure we highlight is that a lot of times we'll go to a conference or we'll go to a networking event or we'll go do something and we forget to do the follow up or we don't have time to do the follow up for a week or two later. And then what's that we that that's a missed opportunity versus having it being able to funnel people into an automation and know that that's going to happen right away, like you know it's happening instead of saying, well, it's unpersonal or whatever. If you don't follow up with them, you know you're going to get zero results.

[Karen King] Yeah, absolutely. And that we are so guilty of that. Even just, you know, as human beings we have life get in the way of the things that we need to do. We have a lot of things that we have to do in our day to day life and it is easy to forget this stuff. So if you can set that to me that's the perfect use of automation. Creating something that is very personalized, very customized. Even things like, you know, when somebody signs up for something, don't send an email straight away. For example, when I get off a call with somebody, I have an email that will go out automatically, but I've put in like a 10 minute wait step so it looks like if it arrived in their inbox 10 seconds after I've hung up, clearly that's not me, that's written and it's not not me trying to impersonate or pretend that it's not automated. But you know, I want it to feel personalized. And so waiting 10 minutes, it looks like I've gotten off the call and put this email together. But there's a lot you can do to really customize and really personalize. My business is all about people first. So looking after people and really giving them the best opportunity or best experience that I can give them, I just do that through automation because I know like if I had to rely on myself or even, you know, when, when I say my team, it's not about that. My team don't do an amazing job because they do. But again, we're all humans, there's always room for human error if we rely on humans. Whereas if you can set it up really well once, put time and effort into it in the beginning, get it right and you can rely on that to be consistently incredible every single time.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Love that. Okay, so let's get specific because I feel like automations is a buzzword just like AI just, you know, there's all these things out there and, and sometimes it's hard to like content creation, right? Like, well, what does that look like? How do I actually start to implement that into my day to day life? So if I'm like, okay, I'm in. I love this, I love what you're saying already. Where do I start with trying to figure out what types of tasks I can automate and what I should do first, where I should start.

[Karen King] [Karen King] I love that question because most people don't start at the beginning. Most people jump in and go, oh, you know, automation, I need software. I actually, which is kind of ironic because I have a software company, I actually tell people, forget about the software when you're getting started because if you jump straight into the software, you're missing the most fundamental parts of setting this up properly. So the first thing I always tell people to do is look at the processes you have in place right now. What are you doing? Map that out, get some, you Know, some paper, some post it notes, whatever it is, look at all of the things you do in the business. So it might be somebody comes in, they buy a product and then this happens, and then this happens. But you'll have lots of different core processes that you go through. And then look at those, each individually and look at the individual steps. Map that all out what is happening right now. Then have a look at what's working well and what's maybe not working so well. And then from there again, forgetting about software and what's actually possible. Dream a little bit about what the most amazing process could be like. Do you want an email to go out to them at this stage? Do you want to, I don't know, like there's so many different things depending on your business. What is the most incredible experience that you could give your customer that's going through this process? Then you have an understanding of what you want. So once you've got everything mapped out, we work with a lot of coaches and course creators, small business owners. So if it's selling a course, for example, somebody has to buy it. They have to have a place to actually buy it. They have to have a form or an order form that they can fill out and put in their credit card details. So then we can actually start looking at what those processes are and what is the software that we need. And then we can start looking at what do we actually need to do to make that process come to life. And what I quite often find people do is jump in. And you know, my best friend Jenny said she's got this platform, so I've jumped in and I'm in there, but I've got no idea what to do. The thing is, if you don't know what you need to do, you don't know how to do it. So having that roadmap, starting with a roadmap is absolutely critical. And I always say to people, it's like if I tried to drive from New York to Los Angeles, you'd probably never see me again. Like if I did that without the roadmap, without directions, you know, I'd probably fall in the Grand Canyon or something.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] I don't know where you'd end up.

[Karen King] Yeah.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] I said who knows where you'd end up?

[Karen King] Oh, exactly. But what we do is we get onto say Google Maps and we map it out, we work out, well, you know what, I want to drive for this long and I need to stop for lunch and blah, blah, you know what those steps are, then it's really easy. I might not know exactly how to do those steps, but I can always ask help once I know what those steps are. And what I see is most business owners or most people using tech in their organization are not techie. And so they get in and they don't know what to do, and it becomes overwhelming. And then they go, you know what? I'll just keep doing it myself, because that's easy. I at least know how to do it.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] I mean, I love a good reverse engineering starting from the end and working towards the beginning. But I also think that what's beautiful about the exercise that you're mentioning is I think a lot of times in organizations, even if there's only like one or two people that are kind of overlapping in their roles, both people have two completely different processes for how they're managing it. And so there's also inconsistency going out in, you know, the way each person is kind of handling things. And so the beauty of this exercise also is, are there things where we just as a team are duplicating efforts? Number one, can we automate it? But number two, are we already like doing double the work because we're both doing things differently or we didn't realize the other person was doing this step in the process? So it seems to me like this is just a great exercise in efficiency as an organization in general.

[Karen King] Definitely. We see a lot of people come across to Goldstar Pro who have done what I said before. They've sort of built this and that, and they've ended up with all these different softwares. And I love when they come across because they can do it all inside of our platform. But the point I'm trying to make is that it's a really good opportunity to really streamline. Look at what you've created. And is it the best version of that? Are you. Are you wasting time? Is it clunky in parts? Are you missing things that you've never really thought of? So stepping back and looking at the process is just such a valuable experience. And I can't emphasize enough that that is the first step of using tech, even though there's no tech involved in it. The first step of simplifying an organization processes, all of that is truly understanding what that looks like.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Yeah, no, that's so good. Okay, so we've kind of identified some of the gaps. We've taken a look at our processes. I think one of the things that I has really stuck in my brain as an entrepreneur building my business, as I've kind of grown and scaled and added people. And all of that is paying attention to the things that only I can do versus the things that I can outsource. And that's where like the automation piece for me really sinks in, is like, I can't. There's certain parts of, let's just take this podcast recording, for example, or like large, large, long form content creation. Nobody else can record this podcast but me. Right? But there's other parts of the process that can be automated or systematized. And so kind of how might we want to really think through what your role is, what your superpower is for your organization and be really honest? Like, do you have questions that you ask clients to like, really get real with themselves about, like, okay, what are you holding on to that you need to let go of that we can automate from a fear place versus like, this is your zone of genius. You need to go forward with this. To your point of now I can go skiing three days a week for this period of time and still make money, and still build a business and still generate income.

[Karen King] What I see a lot of small business owners doing is, you know, they've launched their business because they've got this passion about something they want to help people want to have an impact, but then they get stuck in all that busy work, all the stuff that has to take place. But isn't their zone of genius, as you mentioned? And time and time again I hear from people that just say, I'm just exhausted. Like, I got into business to do XYZ and I spend maybe 10% of my time actually doing that. And so I think that's where the roadmap really comes into place. Highlight on those roadmaps, what are the things that you have to do versus what are the things that maybe a team member can do, automation can do? An example might be I do a call with every new user of Gold Star Pro because I am genuinely interested in connecting with everybody. And as I said, we're very, very people first. Now I have to do that session, but I don't have to do everything else. So I don't have to send them the reminders, the confirmation when they book the call. I don't have to send them the recording after the call. So every part of that is automated. There's a page where people can sign up for a call. They then automatically get reminders. And those reminders are so incredibly valuable. Our show rate is about 98% because people are getting those reminders. Then I'm physically on the call at the end of the call, I do one little movement in the system and that sets up a task for my VA, who then does various different things to send that recording to that person. So that's just one very, very simple example. But it really understand what you need to do, what you want to do. Like, there are things that you might just really love to do. It might not necessarily be you that has to do them, but if you love them, and that's the point of what we're trying to do, then put yourself into those key areas and then find those areas that you don't need to be involved and figure out, can that be automated? Because again, if we automate, we remove that need for human error. But in the example that I'm using, we're pulling passwords and links and things from Zoom and all of those. So I like to have somebody just double checking and making sure that that whole process is, is good. So there will always be a need for that human touch. But the things we don't have to be involved in, that's when the automation comes into play.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Yeah, well, and I want to double down on this. You know, mention this. What do you love to do? What are the things that are your space? And I think the thing for me when it comes to figuring out where to start automation and where to start kind of passing things off to other people are when I look at my to do list and the same task keeps getting carried over from week to week to week to week. And I'm not doing it not because I'm incapable or because it's not important, but just because it's like the thing where I'm like, I don't want to do it, I'm not going to do it. So I push it off day after day after day. And so that to me seems like a great spot to kind of start with. Okay, I'm not doing this for weeks because I don't want to deal with it. Like, for me, this is an automation. Well, I guess it is in a certain way. But like, the first thing I hired in my business was a bookkeeper because I knew financials were not going to be a thing that I wanted to deal with. It was going to be a task that just carried over. And all of a sudden it's going to be tax season and I'm going to be like in real big trouble because I haven't done my books. So, you know, is that kind of another way to start figuring out what types of things we need to offload and automate?

[Karen King] Absolutely, yeah. Looking at those. Looking at those tasks. And I love that, actually, because I'm now looking at my list. What's on there that I don't need to be doing. But, yeah, absolutely. I think that's. That's a really, really good point. As I said, looking at those things that you do need to do versus you don't need to do, and using that roadmap, I think that roadmap is. It's one of these things that time and time again, I see people go, I don't really need to do it. But when we actually start digging into it, there is so much benefit out of doing it. And it can really set the stage for everything in your business, like, you know, a year or two or even six months down the track if you want it to be operating smoothly in the best possible way. That's where the roadmap comes into place. I see so often people just starting to do these things because, oh, you know, this, this has come up. I need to grow my mailing list. Oh, well, I need to build this. And then something else comes up and, oh, you know, now I need to do this. But there's no real plan. It's just all very, you know, they're reacting to what's happening to life as opposed to, this is my plan. You know, right now I need to be doing these things because, you know, that's where I am in my organization, where we are in the business. But in a few months time, I want somebody else on board or, you know, whatever the case may be, starting with that roadmap is so critical, and you'll be. You'll have that list. So even though it's not a to do list that you're doing every day, you'll be able to see those steps and those tasks and very clearly be able to say, okay, this belongs to me. This belongs to her. This just can be automated. Suddenly we've got this space that, you know, initially it might just be kind of chaotic, but once we've done that roadmap, we can really, as you said, reverse engineer the process and implement a system that's in the long term, going to be much, much better.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Okay. So I just have to say that it makes me so happy when guests come on and you lead me directly to my next question. And we haven't even prepped this by any means, but it's so great because I feel like as nonprofits and entrepreneurs in small business, we tend to think very emotionally about the next step where, like you mentioned earlier, we're Emotionally invested. We started this because it's something we're passionate about and we tend to kind of pull that data piece away. So we kind of go with, okay, well, like you, you know, so and so said you should try this tech tool and this is a strategy that's working right now and you need to do this. And we tend to be very reactive because we're trying to grow something that we care so much about emotionally. So I would love for you to kind of talk about too, like how Automations can help us with kind of pulling data in and the analytical side of our business that we might not be naturally tuned to. Like analytics and data for me are not something that I love but I know are super important for me in making decisions like how can we use Automations to help us with the growth of our business because it knows what we are trying to do and can kind of be that kind of North Star, that analytical brain for us so that we can make the right decisions and not spin our wheels on the task list. That's not going to get us to where we're going.

[Karen King] Absolutely. And I think that I love numbers, but I spend a lot of time building things as opposed to looking at the stats. But a really good example, I'm working with someone at the moment who is. This week we've launched an online summit and we're getting some feedback in various different areas about, oh, you know, I didn't get this email that landed in spam or whatever the case may be. The beauty of automation is that it tracks everything. You can see how many visitors you've had to a page, you can see who's opened your emails, you can see who's clicked. There is so much data that is collected when it's done automatically. So as an example, this lady came to me and she said, oh, you know, I've got a couple of people who said they didn't get the email. And so, you know, I don't think it's working properly and blah, blah, blah. I can go into the system and I can see this person received the email at 3 minutes past 8, they opened it at 5 minutes past 8, they clicked on it, you know, whatever. So we can actually see the stats in there now. That's not to say there's not a way that we can improve. So I then went into the actual email stats and I could see that her open rate was sitting about 45% now, industry average is 16 to 26%. So we were well above average. But there's always room for improvement. So I tweaked some things and then the next day we ended up with a 55% open rate because I simplified a few things. Now I could have, without those stats, I could have been saying, oh my goodness, nothing's working. Oh, I need to go in and change everything and rebuild. The thing is that in this example, so many people say, oh, I didn't get the email. Well, you know what, it might have gone in spam, it might have gone in promotions, you might have just clicked on it. Not realizing that it is somebody that you've subscribed to. Having that information allowed us to move forward from a position of authority. We knew that they received the email because we got a report back from their provider saying yes, we've put it in their inbox. So it actually gives you hard, real information, hard facts that you can make decisions on moving forward. I've changed a whole bunch of things today to again improve what we're doing, which I could have wasted a lot of time if I wasn't doing that based on those numbers. So there's a lot of information that we can collect that we can see and things like opt in pages, for example. A really, really easy one to do is do what we call split testing. So you can have two versions of the page, make one small change between the two pages and let it run for maybe a week, two weeks, whatever, depending on your traffic, and see which one is doing better and then choose that as a winner. Without that sort of tracking, got no idea what's really going on. So there's a lot of information you can collect by using.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Yeah, I think that's so important and such great examples. And if you're thinking split testing, AB testing, it sounds way more complicated than it really is. Most software allows you to do it pretty easily, so don't let that stop you. Talk to your people. But you could probably make it work pretty easily. Okay, so as we kind of wrap this up, I would love for you maybe just to share some additional kind of ways that you kind of geek out about automation or some other examples of things that you've seen that you love that maybe people wouldn't naturally think about when it comes to their tasks and their day to day work life.

[Karen King] Well, it's just all the simple things that. Well, I guess something you mentioned earlier about the things that you don't love to do. I used to absolutely hate trying to grow my email list because we all know that we should have a freebie or a lead magnet or something like that and I was still kind of running all over the Internet going, hey, who wants my freebie? And blah, blah, blah. And I really, really didn't enjoy doing it. So I stopped doing it. And for many people, it's the same with social media. I don't love social media, so I don't have a massive social media following. But I'm just in the early stages of bringing somebody on who can create the content. And they're going to batch that for, you know, the next month, two months, three months, whatever the case may be. So you can really use it in that way to just make your life simpler. I think the big thing about automation and tech is consistency. We need to build trust in our customers. There's so much information, so much noise out in the world today. What people, when they find you, they're judging you, good or bad, based on what you're doing. And if you don't follow up, if you're not consistent, if you post on social media three times this week and then don't do it for six months, then you know that's going to make them question whether you're the right person for them to work with. So being able to have that consistency in a way that's simple is going to, you know, push a message out there to people that you are someone, you know, of authority that can be trusted, that, you know, would be great to work with, and so on and so forth. So again, I think we've kind of covered so many different things and I guess benefits of automation, keeping it simple, making it consistent, getting it to do the things that you don't love to do, and doing it in a way that's really, really personalized. So there's so many different examples I could give of how you can use it. I mentioned calendars, I mentioned the freebie that we just did. Then even things for me, like we had a Facebook group. We were letting people into the Facebook group and grabbing their email address and putting it into the software. So I just created an automation that I click one button, lets them into the Facebook group, sends it across to goldstar Pro, and then that email goes out to them automatically. So all of a sudden my email list is growing and all I'm doing is chatting with people and letting them into my Facebook group. So figure out what you want to do and then get in touch with somebody that knows how to use the tech. And that's one thing that we did when we launched our platform. I've mentioned that we're very people first. I wanted to create a space that I needed when I first started. In the tech space, you can use the software, but if you're not an expert, how do you use the software? We don't know what we don't know. So we created a space where we do regular coaching calls and have 247 live chat and all of that. So you don't have to be a tech expert to be able to actually start taking steps forward with the tech. So support is massive.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] I love that and I love what you're kind of weaving through. This is that like automation doesn't necessarily mean technology, it just means systems in some cases. In some cases it is technology. And I think we always preach start with the tools you already have because likely they have automation features that you just probably never looked at before. But I also love that you said when you start with integrating tech, start with the problem that you're actually trying to solve first. Because we say the same thing. What are you trying to solve for? Because otherwise you're going to get stressed out trying to figure out what the tech tool is. So I think a lot of great resources here, ways to think about how we're streamlining our work. There's no one size fits all system. You got to kind of go through your motions and work on that as a team. I appreciate you taking some time to really share your thoughts and insights with us, Karen, but if people want to connect with you, learn more about goldstar Pro, the work that you all do, how do they do that?

[Karen King] So our website is just usegoldstar.com so just, I mean, even Google Gold Star Pro, you'll be able to find it there. And we've recently also launched the Escapepreneur. So that's another one where people can find us. But everything that we do is about making it easier for you to enjoy what you're doing and enjoy your life. And that's where automation to me is key. It's really about giving you the freedom to live a life on your own terms. And now, you know, we've got so many tools available to us in this day and age. We don't have to be doing it all ourselves. So, yeah, I love that.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Well, Karen, thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate your insights.

[Karen King] Thank you so much for having me.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Okay, so what were you most inspired by in this episode? Leave us a comment wherever you're listening. We'd love a review also while you're there, just so that you can help us get this podcast out to more nonprofit leaders who are looking for support. You can find the show notes and links that Karen shared at thefirstclick.net/312 and I really thank you for listening to these episodes and for being here with me every Tuesday or whenever you're listening. Thank you so much and we will see you in the next one.