Using automation to make us more human in business

[00:00:00] Yvonne Heimann: Hey, hey everybody. We are back with another episode of Boss Your Business, where my guests and I tell you how you can build a business around your lifestyle, not the other way around. Let’s not do that. And today I am really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really excited because I got a fellow automation nerd on today.

[00:00:25] Kay is actually over in the UK. So I dunno if it’s just us European that have this whole systems and processes and automation thing. So guys, you know you are going to have fun today. To introduce you to Kay, you have email marketing automation skills to ninja levels. Yes, I’ve been stalking you and I can attest to that.

[00:00:48] With over five years of consulting and training for small businesses all over the world. You are the UK’s leading Active Campaign specialist, one of my favorite tools. So we’ll be [00:01:00] talking about that today. Um, and you are also the founder of Slick Business. Your Active Campaign Academy provides expert help, training and support to email marketers all over the globe.

[00:01:12] And your unique combination of top level strategy and technical skills, plus a lifetime of teaching, make you the perfect person to help anybody’s business unlock their bigger return on investment from email marketing automation, what’s keeping the human touch. Mm-hmm. So, I am really, did I mention I’m really excited to have you today?

[00:01:34] So by the way, I’m really excited to have you today.

[00:01:38] Kay Peacey: I’m quite, really, very excited to be here. It’s, it’s just such a lovely space already. I feel right at home. I love it. Bring it up.

[00:01:47] Yvonne Heimann: So what, what you have missed out on is the green room when we were prepping for this episode where we were already nerding out. It’s like, yeah, we are, we are two sisters from another mister. This is definitely gonna be fun.

[00:01:59] Kay Peacey: [00:02:00] It’s dangerous, right? When you get two automation geek women together. Oh, all bets are off.

[00:02:05] Yvonne Heimann: But the nice, the nice thing is, we both are completely on the same level when we look at automations. Yes, we wanna bring tools and yes, we wanna do less. However, don’t forget about the human aspect around all of that.

[00:02:23] Kay Peacey: Always. It’s always about the human. Always.

[00:02:27] Yvonne Heimann: So tell me. This is, this is always my most favorite question because this is where, where always stories come up that I didn’t see coming, not even with people that I have, that I have known for years. How did you get here?

Kay’s story & her life before Active Campaign

[00:02:43] Kay Peacey: This is, this is just, honestly, this is one of my favorite questions cuz it’s such an outlandish story and it involves somebody that you’ve already met and who you really like, whose name is Melissa Love.

[00:02:55] Yvonne Heimann: So guys, if you, if you missed that episode, uh, Melissa Love [00:03:00] was on, I forgot about, it’s the, it’s the 30k last two Thriving Business episode. I’ll link it in the description. Yeah, because she was one of the ones that came up where it’s like, where did this just come from? You did what?

[00:03:17] Kay Peacey: She has a lot of those stories.

[00:03:19] So Melissa and I happen to live in the same tiny Cornish seaside town in the very little toe of, in the southwest of the UK. And we also happen to have children who are the same age and who went to the same preschool. So Melissa and I met when our kids were like three years old and at that time, we were mostly talking about how to survive the toddler years, not go completely mental, trying to keep body and soul together and also just to get to the end of any given sentence was a victory, right?

[00:03:59] It’s fine. [00:04:00] And Melissa would probably tell you the very first time she tried to make better friends with me, I rebuffed her and said, I don’t have time for any extra friends in my life right now because my dad recently died, and I’m really sad about that. And everything is horrible in my life and I literally don’t have time to have friends.

[00:04:16] Yvonne Heimann: I’m just surviving.

[00:04:20] Kay Peacey: We were just surviving. So Melissa, to her credit, was not put off by this, and she tells me that actually she thought this was a desirable thing in a potential new friend was that she was gonna have to work for it. I don’t know. I can’t remember this bit. But anyway, right.

[00:04:35] So she seduced me over the next 10 years. So we had 10 years of friendship after this. I did not understand what she did for a living, which it turns out is to do with website design and she’s freaking awesome at it. Mm-hmm. Right. You know, this. Um, and she had no idea what I had done professionally either.

[00:04:52] Fast forward 10 years later, we are sitting around. The kids are now 13, 14. We are pretending that they’re [00:05:00] being given Spanish lessons after school. But actually the real reason we’re there is so that we can all have a cup of tea and a really good gossip around the kitchen table in my friend Cecil’s house.

[00:05:12] And I remember, and I was just coming out of hip surgeries, I, I have this, this, I have a disability, which is quite serious, and it had taken me out of the workforce. So I had the whole double whammy. I was looking after elderly people, looking after kids. I was disabled. I had not been in the workforce for a really long time, and I had a whole stack of people who had never known me in a professional guy.

[00:05:33] So at this point, Melissa has literally no idea what my work history is, but she said, hey, you seem like a smart person, Kay. I know you well enough to know this, and in a leap of faith, Melissa decided that I was the person she needed to learn how to use Active Campaign.

[00:05:52] Yvonne Heimann: I love how those synchronicities just, just happen, where it’s like, you know what? I have, I have no, and [00:06:00] I have friends like that too, where it’s like, I have no idea what you actually do for work or however, but you know what?

[00:06:06] I know you.

[00:06:08] Kay Peacey: Right. She just knew somehow and trusted me, um, and paid me to go learn how to do Active Campaign because she couldn’t find anyone to work this incredible piece of software so she could see the potential of Active Campaign for automation, for emailing and for growing her business, but she couldn’t find anyone who was competent enough to do the things that she wanted to do. She would just, she Melissa’s like, hey, I’ll just build one. And she picked me.

[00:06:34] Yvonne Heimann: And that’s not, that sounds like her.

[00:06:38] Kay Peacey: It’s so great, right? Um, it turns out she’s a serial offender at doing this. She likes to take random people and turn them into, she like repurpose you into some sort of tech queen.

[00:06:47] I don’t know. It’s not just me is what I’m saying. What she didn’t know was that I’d actually been a database administrator for the NHS.

[00:06:55] Yvonne Heimann: Oh my God.

[00:06:55] Talk about nerd. That was not in your bio.

[00:06:58] Kay Peacey: That’s seriously, [00:07:00] that’s SQL Nerd. Um, I had been an e-learning project manager also for the NHS, so I knew about delivering stuff online.

[00:07:08] I had taught, um, European computer driving license, which shows you my age. Um, and I was originally a math teacher. So I had this whole heap of skills, which actually were almost an exact fit for the sort of thing that Melissa needed somebody’s brain to get to work on. But honestly, it is the biggest stroke of luck you could possibly imagine.

[00:07:30] I don’t really understand how it happened, but I thank the whatever gods there are that this happened. Mostly I thank Melissa because it was her leap of faith, right? So I started learning how to use Active Campaign and it was a match made in heaven. And at this point I knew almost nothing about modern digital marketing.

[00:07:49] I hadn’t been under the heard of a website in probably 10 or 15 years. Like I could do some basic [00:08:00] HTML from when websites were first coming out. That’s how old I am. I remember when we were first getting email addresses.

[00:08:07] Yvonne Heimann: You mean that’s how knowledgeable you are.

[00:08:09] Kay Peacey: How knowledgeable and experienced I am.

[00:08:13] Okay. So, and this it turns out is one of the secret superpowers of being, uh, a person who comes into this digital world. And I was in my mid forties at this point, so I had no preset agenda. I didn’t have to unlearn all the stuff in the middle. I came straight from coding directly into HTML and a database was Microsoft Access, straight into Active Campaign and modern no-code automation tools and modern digital marketing and the, the huge liberation and democratization of marketing.

[00:08:45] Yvonne Heimann: So hold, hold, hold on.

[00:08:49] No, no, you are, you are all good. I just caught up on something and I hope I’m not throwing you under the bus here. You were in your mid forties, beginning mid [00:09:00] forties when you made this huge switch.

[00:09:04] Kay Peacey: Yeah, from nothing.

[00:09:07] Yvonne Heimann: I am seriously, because I’m like, I’m looking at you.

[00:09:09] I’m like, yeah, you are, you are, you are my, it’s all good. You’re my age. And I’m like, and I personally have been struggling with this. I’m, I’m turning 41 this year where it’s like, I’m not where I thought I would be and this, this struggle is coming up, so this is why I’m literally getting goosebumps right now, where it’s like listening to you in that mid forties range where in it I’m like, when I grew up people in their forties are old.

[00:09:42] Kay Peacey: I know. Like I’m 51 now, nearly.

[00:09:49] And at 45, so before this conversation happened with Melissa, I had been doing bits and [00:10:00] pieces. I was, um, an exam, a senior examiner for an exams board. So I, the, the, my brain was still ticking over, but it was a very, very part-time thing. I was also teaching in a community choir and arranging music.

[00:10:12] But nothing, there was nothing that paid very well, and my position at that point was that I was going to slide into a not very monetized old age, never having done anything particularly brilliant with my brain, the size of a planet. And that that was frankly not a great prospect. What I did not anticipate happening was for a chance conversation with a friend who I knew because our kids were at school to set this thing in motion that’s landed me as the world’s leading Active Campaign specialist. I genuinely, I don’t think anyone could.

[00:10:52] Yvonne Heimann: And it’s like, I’m, I’m, I’m literally just sitting here and if you are just listening to the podcast and you’re not watching [00:11:00] it, it’s like I’m, I’m, I’m trying to also take a couple of notes while just checking my head, while having goosebumps because you are the impersonation of anything is possible and it’s never too late.

[00:11:14] Kay Peacey: I agree.

[00:11:15] Yvonne Heimann: Actually where I’m like, between the serendipity of running into Melissa when you did her not being, what often happens nowadays? Oh yeah, she just brushed me off school. That, no. Like I wanna know that woman.

[00:11:30] Kay Peacey: To be fair.

[00:11:32] Yvonne Heimann: You deciding to do this, you’re turning literally on in, in, in your business level, in your work level.

[00:11:40] It sounds like you turned everything completely around at an age where, where other people are like, why do I even try? Yeah. Holy moly, and this is why I like this question. You never know what comes outta it.

[00:11:58] Kay Peacey: Yeah. [00:12:00] Uh, I, I, I can’t really explain it. It was like the situation that Melissa offered to me and I immediately said yes to, which was based on trust between friends, because we’d been through some stuff by then. We’d looked after each other. Melissa came and looked after me after I’d had surgeries on my hips. You know, we were, we were close friends, but we knew nothing about one another professionally. And that’s where I find it really interesting that that trust and that moment, it’s a real sliding doors moment.

[00:12:32] The offer from one person and the acceptance from another to go start this journey. And um, yeah, what a privilege.

[00:12:41] Yvonne Heimann: Wow. Yeah. Oh yeah. I need to find my thought again here. Wow. Yeah.

[00:12:48] Kay Peacey: Shall I tell you the rest of the story?

[00:12:50] Yvonne Heimann: Yes, please.

Kay’s obsession with Active Campaign

[00:12:51] Kay Peacey: So I started getting really good at Active Campaign and I became pretty much obsessed with it because my brain, I think, was very hungry for something that I could get my [00:13:00] teeth into.

[00:13:00] My kid was growing up, my, uh, disability was less painful, so I was coming back to life from really having been dormant in that intellectual sphere for a very long time and having had to cope with a lot of pain and a lot of barriers to being able to participate in life. So everything was opening up.

[00:13:19] It’s like the spring. The spring is coming. So I became obsessed with Active Campaign and it was like something just sparked off inside me and I wanted to know everything. I’m a details person. I’m a systems person. I’m a details person, so it just hit my aptitude spot and I craved all the information.

[00:13:38] And I’m also in the fortunate position where I could afford to spend a lot of time learning a new skill just because I wanted to. It interested me. I was driven by curiosity and also I’m really lazy and I hate things being inefficient or taking a long time, so I was obsessed genuinely with finding the fastest, easiest way to get anything done with Active Campaign.[00:14:00]

[00:14:00] Yvonne Heimann: I’m laughing over here because I also am like, everybody is like, how? Why? Because I’m lazy. If I don’t have to do something twice over again, automate that shit.

[00:14:11] Kay Peacey: It’s a process and that’s the thread that ran through everything. So what happened was then Melissa started telling other people that I could work Active Campaign. And I was like, shut up Melissa. I don’t wanna have a business. I don’t wanna work for anyone else. I just wanna be here in my little Cornish town and just help you out a bit.

[00:14:30] Yvonne Heimann: Hold, hold, hold. She got you started on the whole Active Campaign. She then promotes and you are like, I don’t want this.

[00:14:37] Kay Peacey: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I really dug in. It took her years and she would put me in situations where she would’ve said to someone, yeah, so-and-so wants to hire you. I’m, they, they’re, they’re, they’re gonna give you a call on Thursday.

[00:14:50] I’m like, I don’t want do this. She was like, you’re gonna do it because they really need you and you are the only one. Um, and this carried on. And so during this time, I had to learn how to be a [00:15:00] freelancer. I’d never been a freelancer. I didn’t know how to do anything. I had to learn all that tech, how to handle, how to handle clients.

[00:15:06] I made so many mistakes, so many mistakes as we all do, but I did them in a fairly short space of time because I have Melissa supporting me all the way and helping me get past these barriers. So she didn’t just point me at it and abandon me. She stayed right there. Advocating, mentoring, coaching every step of the way, and also just pushing me over a cliff every now and again when I didn’t wanna go.

[00:15:30] Yvonne Heimann: You wanna, you wanna fly? You gotta jump off a cliff.

[00:15:33] Kay Peacey: Yeah. Right. So, Melissa’s a cliff pusher as well, but I respect that about her completely. Um, and look what happened, you know, it turned out well in the end. Um, so I wound up over the next three or four years, my profile in Active Campaign land grows and grows.

[00:15:46] I’ve got consultancy clients coming out of my ears. I’m putting my prices up. Everyone wants to work with me. Um, and I wasn’t getting the joy from it, at this point. This is about four years in because that level of [00:16:00] thinking and that level of client work is hard. And it’s exhausting. It is exhausting and it’s hard.

[00:16:07] And whilst I loved what I was doing, I also was really aware that I wasn’t reaching as many Active Campaign users as there were people who needed help with how to use Active Campaign. And it dawned on me that most of my clients actually, I was spending a lot of time teaching them how to not break the stuff that I built or how to own it.

[00:16:28] I wanted to be able to teach people to fish. I didn’t wanna keep catching their fish for them. I wanna teach you to fish. You go off, carry on, automating all the things with my blessing. I am happy for you. I don’t wanna do it for you. I wanna teach people how to do it.

[00:16:41] Yvonne Heimann: We are so much freaking alike.

[00:16:42] Literally, we have so much alike. It’s like even back in the day when I was designing websites, I’m like, I don’t wanna do the everyday nitty gritty with you. Mm-hmm. I wanna get you set up so you know how to handle your own shit. I got [00:17:00] you. I got you out of your diapers. You now can walk by yourself.

[00:17:04] Kay Peacey: Uhhuh, go. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so I ended up making a training course, which is completely free, and it’s called Accelerated Active Campaign. This was the very first training I made, and it was born outta laziness and frustration, which I know you will identify with.

[00:17:22] Yvonne Heimann: I don’t wanna repeat myself again. Because, and the funny thing is I’m laughing over here inside so bad because, that’s literally what I’m doing right now in my business where its like I answered this question now 10 times.

[00:17:37] I get that my clients need this answer. I get it.

[00:17:42] Kay Peacey: I’m done answering it though, right?

[00:17:44] Yvonne Heimann: Yeah. We, we are turning it now into start your ClickUp. It’s like the, the nitty gritty, the, where the hell do I need to click a button? And I’m like, there you go. Let’s, let’s get you taken care of. Let’s save you some money, let’s get you taken care of.

[00:17:58] So I feel you. [00:18:00] It has nothing to do with our clients. It has nothing to do with, with their knowledge level or, or their tech knowledge. It just is. If you are learning something new, there’s going to be these 10,000 questions that we have to answer over and over and over and over again, and on one hand, I’m really happy to do that and get you where you need to be. But on the other hand, I’m not a freaking broken record.

[00:18:25] Kay Peacey: Oh my God, you’ve understood that. So your clarity is, it’s like you are in my head when I was making this course. So I’m, I was answering those same questions again and again and again and again.

[00:18:34] Cause I was in the Active Campaign official Facebook group. I had a high profile in there. I was, you know, I knew what the patterns were. And because I’m a teacher, I knew how to fix it. I knew how to get people past it. So, and I was like, I can’t, I gotta automate this, right? Mm-hmm. I gotta automate the delivery of these key learning points just to get people off my back really?

[00:18:52] Because I didn’t want ’em in my inbox. Or, or tagging me to answer these questions. So anyway, I lashed out this course called Accelerated Active Campaign, which is [00:19:00] still running now and has had literally thousands of Active Campaign users through it and Active Campaign staff and Active Campaign consultants.

[00:19:06] Yvonne Heimann: Like it’s killer, it’s killer.

[00:19:11] When you, when you end up, when you end up training the employees of the mm-hmm. I would not know anything about that. Mm-hmm.

[00:19:17] Kay Peacey: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, that’s the, that was the free training. Then eventually, I managed to pluck up the courage to do a paid for training, which was about the very sexy subject of deliverability and engagement in email marketing.

[00:19:32] Necessary, but not the easiest sell in the world because not everyone is far enough along to know they need it. And then the last part is that I decided it all needed to be in a big membership so that I could really connect with the people who wanted to learn. And that’s where I am right now. I run the Active Campaign Academy, which is like a subscription learning service where you get access to Kay’s Active Campaign brain on tap.

[00:19:59] Yvonne Heimann: Let’s go. [00:20:00] Now, I’m, I’m curious, this is completely egotistical, this question here. Ooh. How are you framing your membership? Not that I’m building one right now as we speak.

Active Campaign automation features

[00:20:11] Kay Peacey: Not that there’s any overlap here at all. Okay. So we have two levels. We have Essential and Advanced. And the reason we do that is because Active Campaign is massive.

[00:20:23] It has four different plan levels and different product offerings, and the stuff you wanna do with it can range from, I wanna send an email once a week and have a welcome sequence up to crazy corporate level, global shenanigans. You cannot serve both those audiences with a single level. Correct.

[00:20:42] Yvonne Heimann: So guys, when, when you are listening, um, to explain this just a little bit for everybody that has not been exposed to Active Campaign and why I do love Active Campaign, I’m just on a lifetime membership with somebody else. Um, Active Campaign doesn’t just do email newsletter. [00:21:00] It’s not just their standard automation. Active Campaign can also deep data integrate with your shopping cart, with your Shopify and all of that. As well as function as a full-on CRM. So one of the higher Active Campaign plans has full-on CRM automation and tracking capabilities similar to your Pipedrive or HubSpot.

[00:21:26] Kay Peacey: Yep. Nailed it. That’s a great description of Active Campaign. And there’s other superpowers that integrates with pretty much anything.

[00:21:35] Yvonne Heimann: Deep data integration.

[00:21:42] Kay Peacey: We could, we could nerd out about traditional content and the automations, but that the integrations are the real joy of it. You can get Active Campaign to talk to any other tech pretty much that you want it to, and you can control everything about how that conversation plays out, which means you can automate pretty much [00:22:00] anything that you don’t want to have to keep doing manually.

[00:22:04] And this is why I love it.

[00:22:05] Yvonne Heimann: And that’s, that’s where it comes back around to needing those two levels where it’s like, if somebody is just starting out, if you are gonna deep dive completely into all of the integrations and all of the capabilities you, you got, potentially you’re gonna just run for the woods.

[00:22:20] So I love how you have those two levels of, hey, I’m just getting started. I just need to get a newsletter out. I just wanna have the regular automations. If somebody signs up for this thing, I just want it to all happen. And then you have the advanced one, which I’m assuming dives really deep into all of the nerdy features.

[00:22:40] Kay Peacey: Yeah. Advanced is like anything goes. Essentials is very much like we’re gonna keep you on the safe paths, keep you focused on the low hanging fruit, the stuff that will really drive some revenue for your business. And then when you are ready, if you want something that’s covered in our advance, we’ll tell you if you want that you need to upgrade or we think it’s time for you [00:23:00] to upgrade and bring in this other feature.

[00:23:02] But I never, I would never advise someone to do that when they’re first using Active Campaign because of the overwhelm. If you come in from starting from zero and go into trying to use advanced automation and integration features, you, you are so likely to get overwhelmed. Like I didn’t learn, I didn’t learn Active Campaign overnight.

[00:23:20] You know, it took me four years probably of working it out, figuring it out, falling. I’ve fallen into every hole there is in that place.

[00:23:28] Yvonne Heimann: Get lost with active campaign.

[00:23:30] Kay Peacey: Yeah, I’ve got lost. I’ve done things the hard way. Mm-hmm. The great, it’s what I love about the membership now, right?

[00:23:36] So there’s these two levels. People pay monthly so you can come in and out as you please. I don’t expect everyone else to be obsessed with their email marketing automation all, all every day. That’s my job, right. So when you want a little top up, you come find me and we talk about whatever it is you need. So we run an office hours twice a week every week.

[00:23:56] And those are, you can ask me anything Active Campaign [00:24:00] related. It can be where is the button for this? How do I do this particular process? What do you recommend as a use case for this feature? Uh, talk to me about something exciting we can do with this integration. Or it can be some huge strategy question or how do I improve my deliverability? You know, or troubleshoot this thing.

[00:24:18] This contact’s done something weird. What the heck’s going on? Literally anything. Um, and it’s the most fun thing. And to back up that we have a huge bank of of courses, screenshots, GIFs, showing you how to do stuff, everything, and it’s growing and it’s really exciting. So it’s very member driven, which is the thing that’s very dear to my heart.

[00:24:40] We respond to what members need most at any given time.

[00:24:43] Yvonne Heimann: And that, that was actually one of my big things that, that I personally have been struggling with my business. I am, I’m a lot reactive. I, um, I can’t give you the answer if you have a question. Mm-hmm. So with [00:25:00] my YouTube content and everything, it’s like always, yeah. Do I have an idea of what you’re gonna struggle with? Yes. But there is all of these bits and pieces that funnel into making a decision and all of the things. So I similar have structured my membership around this, where you can submit training video requests. The idea is really having those one, two minute short videos because for us with ClickUp, all of the trainings are half an hour long.

[00:25:25] Who has time for a half an hour long video to figure out how to add a task and ClickUp, right? Right.

[00:25:31] Kay Peacey: Just tell me what I need to know in five minutes flat. No fluff. No filler. No messing about. Tell me what I need to know and let me get on with it.

[00:25:38] Yvonne Heimann: I found my spirit sister. So yeah, exactly the same idea.

[00:25:43] So just give me the answer. Just give the damn answer.

[00:25:47] Kay Peacey: To make this thing happen. We talk about it like with a concierge, and so if the thing, if the things you need are there, we’ll tell you how to put them together. And then send you off to go learn the [00:26:00] skills if you don’t have such and such a skill, right?

[00:26:02] Go do this training, then come back and we’ll show you how to put it all together. So it’s very much meeting people where they’re at, and that’s where the teaching lifetime skill is so valuable. That differentiation, knowing where someone is on the scale of understanding the bigger picture and the strategies and the technical skills, there are so many things to that come into play.

[00:26:23] Like you, you mentioned there’s something about the, the surrounding tech. You know, what have they, what have they got to play with? What else is going on in their business? Yeah. Have they got a team of people or is it just them? There are so many questions. So it’s like we listen really deeply and intently to where you’re at and what you need, and then we direct you to the stuff if it’s already there.

[00:26:43] Answer any questions you have, and if we don’t have that particular tutorial, we’re just gonna make it for you right there and then.

[00:26:48] That’s it.

[00:26:48] Yvonne Heimann: That’s exactly. I have a submission form where it’s like the idea for [00:27:00] in, in my case also is we are, I often work with, um, business owners, with CEOs that have a team that do not have the basic knowledge of the tool to even do their job.

[00:27:13] Yeah. So being able for them to just hear five team members that have to work in ClickUp, they have no idea what they’re doing right now. Yeah. Go train them. So with that, we have just a form that says, hey, what do you need to know? Yeah. And I quickly can record the video, upload it into the membership base, and there it is.

[00:27:35] So they can build resources around it as long as their team members are in the membership. You literally can build a tree, a company, internal training, using all of my stuff. You don’t have to build the SOPs around it. You don’t have to build the training around it. You don’t have to support them because we have the support calls.

[00:27:54] Kay Peacey: We do that for you.

[00:27:56] Yvonne Heimann: Yeah, girl. I knew why I was so damn excited [00:28:00] to have you on today.

[00:28:01] Kay Peacey: Oh, I love it. I love it. And I love what you said about teams there as well, because the reality for many businesses is if there’s more than one person involved in the business, or if you’ve got a VA or an online business manager, or even if you are working with an outside consultant, there’s gonna be stuff that both parties need to be involved with.

[00:28:22] Yeah. When you are having that discussion. And so we actually have built into our membership as a nominee thing where everyone, every subscription comes with like a free plus one. So you can bring a buddy into the membership at no extra cost, and probably 70% of our members take that up either for, uh, a VA or, or a team member in who’s in the house or someone that they’ve hired because they know that this person needs to get the best practice method, not just lashing it together, because unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who say they can do Active [00:29:00] Campaign.

[00:29:00] Yvonne Heimann: Oh God. Right.

[00:29:01] Kay Peacey: I know. And it’s painful because I, I, we pick up the pieces a lot and we, we soothe the people whose Active Campaigns accounts have been trashed and they’ve had the wrong emails sent and their date is all over the place and it’s just, it’s horrible that this happens.

[00:29:17] Yvonne Heimann: I feel your pain.

[00:29:18] Kay Peacey: Right? So we are like the safety blanket for if you, if you’re gonna hire someone to work with you on Active Campaign, get a subscription and get you and them in, because you need to be in as the strategist. You need to know enough about how to work this tool. To understand what it can and could and should be doing for your business, and then whoever’s implementing and building, they need to build it right.

[00:29:41] And, and clean.

[00:29:44] Yvonne Heimann: And they have the resources with you.

[00:29:46] Kay Peacey: Oh yeah. I’m here. We’re here for you. We’ve got, we’ve got this amazing directory now, which is fully searchable, which will take you to, uh, a post in our community, a course, a tutorial video, a screen grab, a [00:30:00] GIF, a blog post, whatever we’ve got that tells you the answers.

[00:30:04] You can search by keyword on the whole place. Super powerful.

[00:30:11] Yvonne Heimann: There was a reason you were on my show at this point in time.

[00:30:18] Kay Peacey: Hit me up. I’ll show you around in the back end sometimes.

[00:30:20] Yvonne Heimann: Oh. You might, you might wanna take that back because I’m gonna pick you up on that.

[00:30:26] Kay Peacey: I’m like, I’m inviting, I’m inviting you.

[00:30:29] God, I love showing off the backend tech that we’ve created because it’s really special. Can I tell you about a thing that you are really like?

[00:30:38] Yvonne Heimann: Yes, please.

[00:30:39] Kay Peacey: We’ve got a built in, uh, member engagement monitoring system, so we call it our retention system. I can’t, it’s got a funny acronym, but I can’t remember what that is right now. But it basically scores every single member based on when was the last time they visited the site or consumed a lesson or came to office hours or posted in the community or [00:31:00] commented or you know, any interaction.

[00:31:03] And we score them based on that. And if their score starts dropping below a certain threshold over a certain time period, we get in touch with ’em. Say, hey, you doing all right? We’ve missed you. Come back in. The whole thing is fully automated using my magic Airtable, which I love.

Kay’s tools and processes

[00:31:29] Yvonne Heimann: So you already mentioned a couple of your tools and processes that allow you to run all of this. So you just mentioned your magic Airtable set up for all of that. I am pretty sure you’re using Active Campaign, too.

[00:31:48] Kay Peacey: Yeah, yeah. Active Campaign involved.

[00:31:52] Yvonne Heimann: Probably. How, how do you make all of this happen?

[00:31:57] Because I, I have, I have the landing page [00:32:00] open right now. There is a lot that members are getting. There’s a lot of things happening. You are looking after your members, so it’s not just, hey, you come in, I take your money and go away. So what are, what are some of the tools and processes that allow you to make all of this happen?

[00:32:18] Kay Peacey: Great question. Um, so when we, when I created the academy, my vision of it was always that it would be a place to connect with the humans of the world who are using Active Campaign. God, that sounds really grandiose when I say it like that, but I really mean it because it’s such a privilege to get to know the people who are running the businesses and what, what’s driving them?

[00:32:39] What are they actually trying to get done? And I can be most effective as a teacher and help them the fastest and the best if I know them as humans and understand where they’re coming from, where they’re at and where they’re trying to get to. And the quickest way to do that is to meet them in some way.

The importance of meeting members and knowing them as humans

[00:32:54] So it was really important to me that we had office hours, that we’re live calls, and that they’re not [00:33:00] recorded. We do not record them because everyone should be free to speak openly on those calls, and we need to be able to share screens. For example, if I wanna troubleshoot something, we’ve gotta be able to see it on screen.

[00:33:11] And you can’t do that if you’re recording stuff because of data protection and stuff like that. So we have Zoom calls. Uh, so what are we using for that various schedule? You know, the usual calendar sharing stuff. We’ve got a community, so the community is like anytime we’re not on a Zoom call, you can ask me anything.

[00:33:27] I’m gonna be in there all waking hours basically, if I’m honest, because I’m obsessed. Like I love answering questions about Active Campaign. So we run that on a wonderful platform called Circle. I you’ve come across that one, but goodness. Circle is beautiful. It automates well. It, for me, it’s head and shoulders, the best community platform option.

[00:33:50] There is no, no competition. Um, and we completely love it. Circles turned into like, um, a resource library or, or [00:34:00] it feels fantastic in there because people connect. We chat, we solve problems, and everything is fully searchable as well. Um, so we have Circle and then we’ve got, our courses are held on the website.

[00:34:15] We use a WordPress site with Divi and our secret weapons. There are lifter LMS for the managing the membership. Really lovely. Um, we’re actually on the free plan with Lifter LMS. We you can build crazy good stuff just using the free open access we’re on Lifter LMS.

[00:34:33] Yvonne Heimann: I, I love, I love Lifter. My only thing was for this year was like, okay, I just need to go simple.

[00:34:40] So. Mm-hmm. I pulled back and went to Thrive Cart. But yeah, Lifter, Lifter was my choice as an LMS.

[00:34:48] Kay Peacey: Yeah. And I’m lucky because I have Melissa Love, who’s our website. You know, the friend who started, it all happens to being a world leading genius web designer. Yep, A coincidence. So I have [00:35:00] Melissa in my back pocket to help me decide on website, things like that.

[00:35:04] So we use WooCommerce to do the subscriptions. That’s all hooked up using a mix of Zapier to do stuff that otherwise, you know, it’s like the glue where, where something doesn’t talk to something else. We just use Zapier to fill it up. Um, and the amazing tool that is WP Fusion.

[00:35:21] Yvonne Heimann: Yep. Yeah. Okay.

[00:35:23] Kay Peacey: Oh, we talk the same language.

[00:35:25] Yvonne Heimann: Oh, we’re talking the same language. I’m like, I’m coming from web design. I am more the, uh, Elementary and Astra theme rather than Divi. And I don’t get along well for whatever reason. Yeah. But yeah, I’m like, I’ve, I’ve built, I had built my whole academy on WordPress using Lifter LMS, using WP Fusion and all the things.

[00:35:44] Yeah. Yeah. It’s just, it got to a point for me personally, where, okay, what’s my focus and my focus right now? Is just better served that Thrive Cart. So it’s, it’s again, it’s just like we do with our, with our [00:36:00] members, right? Yeah. What’s your situation? What’s your goal? What’s your values? Let’s find you the right solution.

[00:36:07] Kay Peacey: Yeah, absolutely. And, and that solution is probably going to change over time. Yeah. We didn’t start out on Circle, we started out with a, a separate Facebook group. Mm-hmm. Um, but that just quickly became overwhelmed with the volume of technical knowledge and it was like, wait, this stuff, we are answering questions.

[00:36:24] There is valuable technical knowledge and answers in here, and it’s just disappearing down this horrendous impossible to search Facebook feed and not getting in front of people. We have to have a better solution there. Yep. And so Circle, we delighted a lot of research and at that point to decide where that community was gonna go, because it’s a big deal.

[00:36:43] If you wanna move a community, it’s a big deal. You gotta take everyone with you.

[00:36:46] Yvonne Heimann: Ask, ask my community. We have switched now. I don’t even know how often.

[00:36:52] Kay Peacey: Yeah, it’s tough. It’s tough. Yep. But it was absolutely the right move for us. Um, I’m trying to think what else we used. Tech wise [00:37:00] we do, we use Slack a lot for communications, um, Bonjuro for sending personal videos, and a lot of these tools have a really beautiful integration with Active Campaign where you can just put a step right there in an automation.

[00:37:12] And have it go create something in this other platform. So when someone joins the academy for the first time, they come through the welcome automation, yada yada. They’re getting emails and access, and WP Fusion is creating their membership and all that stuff. I get a Slack notification and then I get a Bonjuro task created so that I can send them a personal welcome email.

[00:37:34] And in that task, I see everything I need to know to give me the right context. I see what they’ve asked on the way in. What was your burning reason for joining? It’s right there in front of me. These integrations are incredibly power, powerful. Making you seem like an absolute magician who knows everything, when in fact you’re just really good at being lazy and automating everything.

[00:37:58] Yvonne Heimann: You just, you just know how to get the [00:38:00] information. You already told me everything. Now I just have to make sure I have the information.

[00:38:04] Kay Peacey: Put the right information in the right place without someone needing to copy and paste it. That’s really what’s underneath a lot of automation process.

[00:38:12] Yvonne Heimann: Yeah. It’s, it’s, you just need to pay attention to the detail. And with us it’s like we are just efficient. We are not lazy, we’re just efficient. Mm-hmm. I don’t like to have to do more than I actually have to do, so let’s make it easy. Yeah. Oh my God. I’m gonna have to have you back on in the future. After I looked at all the backend.

[00:38:37] Kay Peacey: I’m quite busy. I’m quite busy.

[00:38:43] Yvonne Heimann: Oh, somebody take that knife outta my back. Whoa. Oh yeah.

[00:38:49] Kay Peacey: You know what I was thinking. Just really just now though. I was just thinking cuz we asked this question, I have this big Facebook group called Automate Your Business with Active Campaign. That’s like our public Facebook [00:39:00] group that anyone can join.

[00:39:01] And we actually ran a poll in there this week, which said if we could connect using this magic integration that you can do in automation, if we could connect that and have have it create tasks in a task management tool, which one would you choose? And you’ll never guess which one’s coming out top.

[00:39:20] Yvonne Heimann: Better not Asana.

[00:39:21] Kay Peacey: It’s ClickUp.

[00:39:25] So right now there isn’t a really good way to create tasks directly from automation in Active Campaign. And I was like, do you know what? We need to get some people power on this because this is the obvious need and ClickUp should get on it.

[00:39:40] Yvonne Heimann: However. Mm-hmm. However, I am doing something like that already using Make. I prefer using Make rather than Zap.

[00:39:54] Kay Peacey: Right. You can do it if you go via a third party. Yeah. But what I am talking about is the really [00:40:00] slick ones where it’s right there in the automation. So you do not need to pay any tasks on Make or Zapier or whatever. It’s right there.

[00:40:07] Yvonne Heimann: So you have the Active Campaign connections.

[00:40:11] Mm-hmm. I have the ClickUp connections.

[00:40:15] Kay Peacey: I feel something happening here. This is not a coincidence that we posted that yesterday.

[00:40:20] Yvonne Heimann: Let’s make it happen.

[00:40:22] Kay Peacey: I think we should make it happen. They can’t say no.

[00:40:24] Yvonne Heimann: I’m chatting with Head of Product right now. Literally Uhhuh Uhhuh about something.

[00:40:29] All right.

[00:40:29] Kay Peacey: We’re gonna talk to them about CX integration with Active Campaign.

[00:40:35] They can’t fight both of us at the same time. They would so lose. Okay. I know.

[00:40:40] Yvonne Heimann: Let’s make it happen. I’ll, I’ll reach, I’ll reach, I’ll reach out to my gal. Yeah. That is making things happening in the company for me. So, I, I know where to find you, so let’s make it happen. Let’s make it happen for both of our, I might just move back to Active Campaign, maybe?

[00:40:57] Kay Peacey: See, I’m very seductive. It’s very dangerous talking to you.

[00:40:59] Yvonne Heimann: I love [00:41:00] Active Campaign. Ideal. Right now I’m using Encharge because I’m on the lifetime deal.

[00:41:05] Kay Peacey: Yeah. Which is probably smart move for you at the point where you are right now. You know? And maybe the time will come for a move and you’ll be ready to migrate and you’ll be like, hey, Kay.

[00:41:15] How do we migrate to Active Campaign? And I’ll be like, oh, we have a course for that and some resources.

[00:41:21] Yvonne Heimann: I love it. And with that, guys talk about we have resources for that. You can find, Kay, in the description. You’re gonna find all the social media links, you’re gonna find the free course, you’re gonna find all the things right down here.

[00:41:37] However, if people are just listening, go tell them, Kay, where can they find you?

[00:41:42] Kay Peacey: Okay, so you can find me by my name Kay Peacey on LinkedIn, um, and you can find me on Facebook in my lovely free Facebook community, which is called Automate Your Business With Active Campaign. That’s a really nice community. [00:42:00] Um, you can find me on the [email protected] and you’ll like this.

[00:42:06] The reason this business is called Slick Business, so Slick Business.co, is because one of my early clients said, you know what, when I’ve, when you finish working with me, my business is gonna be slick as bleep. Now, Yvi’s disappeared at this point, so I’m hoping she’s gonna be back in at some point. I’m gonna carry on talking.

[00:42:26] Uh, the other place you can find me is, um, well, basically on any social, we’re on Twitter as slick_biz, and if you search for anything Active Campaign related, how do I do this in Active Campaign? Who do I do that in Active Campaign? You are gonna find me right at the top of Google search, usually above the Active Campaign results.

[00:42:49] Yvonne Heimann: Talk about little show off. There you go. Love it. We’ll be chatting behind the scenes guys. Mm-hmm. You know, [00:43:00] again, all of the links are in the comment section. We will have came back, uh, already know that. And with that, thank you so much for joining me. This, yeah, this episode just had to happen. Thanks, Melissa for that one.

[00:43:15] And I’ll see all of you again next week. Bye everybody.