Client HQ: Streamline Client Project Management with Notion | Cheryl Chan | Skillshare
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Client HQ: Streamline Client Project Management with Notion

teacher avatar Cheryl Chan, Brand Designer / YouTuber

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction Skillshare

      2:34

    • 2.

      Class Project

      0:44

    • 3.

      Get Set up with Notion

      3:06

    • 4.

      Create a Client Database

      11:52

    • 5.

      Create an Internal Project Space

      8:19

    • 6.

      Create a Client Portal: Project Resources

      11:03

    • 7.

      Create a Client Portal: Project Phases

      8:44

    • 8.

      Create a Client Portal: Project Timelines

      8:52

    • 9.

      Linking Databases Together

      1:35

    • 10.

      My Client Management Workflow

      10:10

    • 11.

      Film a Welcome Video

      8:05

    • 12.

      Final Thoughts

      1:51

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About This Class

Whether you are just starting out as a freelancer or you’re hoping to better establish your service-based business, creating an effective productivity system to manage client projects is key to growing and expanding without overwhelm. In this class, you’ll be learning how to create your own custom Client Project Management system entirely on Notion, so you can streamline your processes, amp up your productivity, and deliver the best client experience. I'm giving you the tested blueprint that I've used in the last 3 years to manage and grow my own service-based business - templates and everything - and you'll come out of the class relieved knowing that you finally have a system you can depend on. 

Be sure to download the Class Resource PDF in the Resources section or download it HERE.

Sign up for Notion for free now. 

What will we explore?

  • Learn the basics of navigating Notion to boost your everyday productivity
  • Design your custom Client Database, so you can access all your past, current and potential clients at a glance
  • Create a dedicated Internal Project Space, so you’ll never waste time searching for your notes again
  • Build a collaborative Client Portal that brings your client experience to the next level
  • Get a peek behind the scenes of my tested Client Management Workflow for my business

This Class is Perfect for you if…

  • You just started a service-based business and you’re confused about what tools to use to organize your client projects.
  • You’re booking more clients now and it’s getting hard to juggle everything. You had “organize & streamline my business process” on your to-do list forever, and you know it’s finally time.
  • You’ve been hearing everyone talk about how amazing Notion is, but when you finally open the app you have no idea where to start
  • You’re ready to grow your business by charging more and reducing admin work. You know you need a system to build your calm & sustainable business
  • Designers, copywriters, consultants, coaches, trainers, and nutritionists. If you work with clients digitally, this is a system for you
  • No prior Notion Experience is needed!

Class Links

Sign up for Notion

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Meet Your Teacher

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Cheryl Chan

Brand Designer / YouTuber

Top Teacher

I run a design studio called Made on Sundays and my ultimate vision is to inspire mindful and creative living. I truly believe that we write the most fulfilling chapters of our stories when we feel in complete alignment with our life, business & purpose. That's why I'm here to help entrepreneurs tell their most intentional brand stories with clarity and confidence through brand and website design, education on YouTube, and other helpful resources.

But really, who am I?

I'm a Canadian gal, born and raised in Vancouver but decided to quit her cushy Brand Manager job to pursue a bigger dream in Amsterdam. My husband and I sold everything from our first apartment together, packed 5 pieces of luggage and never looked back. Now I run a creative studio... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction Skillshare: [MUSIC] One of the hardest parts about starting out as a freelancer, a coach, a consultant, or really any other service-based business is the juggling of all the different tasks, projects, and client communication within your business. About three years ago I discovered an app called Notion, and it has actually transformed how I organize my business and manage my clients and I think they might be able to do the same for you. Hello. I'm Cheryl here. I run a brand in website design business and a YouTube channel called Made on Sundays. For the past 3 1/2 years, I've been working with many clients around the world and I actually run my whole business and client management on Notion. As I've been growing my business over the years, I keep these three main priorities to make sure that my business is growing in the right direction. Number 1, I create organized systems so that I'm more efficient with my time versus spending more money on hiring people or using multiple paid apps. Number 2, I simplify my work so that I can reduce, overwhelm, and prevent burnout. Number 3, I always try to provide the absolute best client experience I can so that they keep coming. Notion is really that all in one platform that helps me centralize everything all in one place to hit those three priorities. In this class, we're going to be using Notion to create your custom and unique client headquarters. This includes a dedicated space for your client dashboard, a place where you can see all of your client information whether it's a pass, current, or a potential client all in one glance and internal project space so that you can see all of your project notes, your request, your expenses, information basically just shared between you and your team and finally your client portal. A collaborative space between you and your clients that houses all of your project information or resources, your project phases, your project timelines, and actually all of your client communication as well. With the setup, you're going to have this really effective client ecosystem that's going to help you be more productive, stay organized, as well as help you achieve all of your business and life goals whether that be making more money or creating more space and time for relaxation. If you are ready to transform your small business, I want to welcome you to the class and I will see you on the other side. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project: In this lesson, let's go over the class project that we'll be working on. Throughout this class, you're going to be learning how to create your own client management system on Notion. As part of that system, you're going to be creating your custom client portal. In the class project section, I would love for you to share your completed client portal customized for you and your business. It can be super basic or you can customize it and decorate it as much as you'd like. Just take a screenshot of it and share it and remember to let us know what your business does. With Notion, the sky is really the limit in terms of customizations so by sharing your thoughts and ideas it can really inspire others as well. Let's get this class started. 3. Get Set up with Notion: In this lesson, let's sign up for your Notion account, which is the only application you'll really need for this whole class. Let's make sure that you get on the right plan. I am on the Notion pricing plan page right now. I am going to leave my referral links to this page in the class resources PDF. Feel free to head to my referral link to get to this page. Notion does have quite a few plans here. They're really only ones that we're looking at today is the free plan and the plus plan right here. Now, if you're just getting started for the purposes of this class, you can do everything within this course in this class through the free plan. The only real difference between the free plan and the plus plan is one, you get to invite unlimited guests. For the purposes of this class, that would mean clients. If you want to invite more than 10 clients into your client portal, then you will need to upgrade into the plus plan. With the free plan, you only get 10 guests, meaning you can only really have 10 clients that share a client portal with you. The other difference is that you can upload unlimited file uploads with the plus plan. That's probably not going to be like any challenge for you, unless you're a designer and you want to upload huge design files into Notion. You can always just work around it, like for example, uploading your big files into Google Drive and then sharing the link to the Google Drive instead. There's really just one basic thing that you need to keep in mind of it's the guests count. For now, just sign up for the free account. Do this class, and up until your 10th client, you can then upgrade into the plus plan. Once you sign up for your account, you can just click on one of these to get started. I would actually recommend using the Notion desktop app. They have one for Mac and for Windows. Personally, I use a MacBook, so I have the desktop app for Mac. For the rest of this class, I will be showing my tutorial through using the desktop application. There's not really much of a difference between the two, but for simplicity sake and for organization, I love to keep my screen as minimalistic as possible, and I feel like the desktop app really keep things as organized as possible on my computer. That's the one that I would recommend. Again, I will leave this link to download your desktop application. It's free in the class resources PDF as well. Once you sign up for your Notion account, let's get to the next lesson where we actually get started on building your workflow. 4. Create a Client Database: In this lesson, we are going to be starting off by creating your client database. Now, this is a space where you'll be able to basically put all of the information about all of your clients, whether they be a past client, a current client, or a potential client. Essentially, you'll be making your own CRM, Customer Relationship Management for free on Notion. Now, if this is not your first time using Notion and you already have some dashboard setup, then you probably have some Home Dash, like you see here. This is my personal Home Dash. In my Home Dash, I have a specific section for anything related to Made on Sundays, my business. Right under here is where I would create my client database as you can see here. But if this is your first time using Notion, then you probably don't have a Home Dash here. We're going to create one really quickly for you. I'm just going to go under Private here and I'm going to click on Add a page. This is going to bring up a brand new page. This is going to be basically your first space on Notion. I am going to call this Home Dash. You can create one for every part of your life like I did, or you can have one specifically for your business. You might want to call this whatever your business name is and then dash or H cue or whatever you like. You can add a cover if you like. I'm just going to click on Change cover and then let's just pick a random one right here. You can also upload your own image. If you prefer that, you can do that. You can also add an icon if you want. I typically like to put a little Home icon there or you can go to Icons here and pick one of these more minimalistic icons so that they can all look similar. I'm just going to click on Empty page right here and it's going to start off a clean new page for you. Let's just create a space for your business. I'm going to call it Made on Sundays Space. [LAUGHTER] You can call it whatever you like, but there's a couple of things you can do. You can double-click it and bold it and underline it. You can even change the size of the text if you wanted to. You can go to Color here. There's these little three dots. If you click on that, there's a ton of things you can do to customize it. One of the things that I like to do is to change the color of it. This will now become your business space. I'm going to be creating a new page here. If you click on the plus button, you can add new sections to your space, and we're going to add a new page. We're going to scroll down here and click on Page. This page is going to be your new client database. Again, you can add a cover if you like. Again, we're going to create an empty page, and this is going to be the space where you create your CRM. First things first, I'm going to click on this Add button again, and we are going to be creating a database. We're going to be scrolling all the way down to where it says Database, and we're going to add an inline database. You can give it a name if you like. I'm going to call it Client Database. Now we have this little database here where you can add properties. Let's start adding some properties. Every time you create a new database, Notion always adds this default one which I don't really like so I'm just going to delete that one and we're going to start off with the name. In a client database, at this point, you want to start brainstorming what information that's important for you to write down for each client that you come across. Every time you come across a potential client or a client that you've already signed, what is information that you need from them? Obviously, their name is going to be important. Next, one thing that I like to include in this database for myself is the year. If you press the Add button here, this will allow you to input different types of properties. You can go through the list, but we will be using a few of them. There's texts which is the one we just used , number, selection. This would be what we'll use next, which is one selection of something. Multi-select means you can select multiple tags for something, their status, date, person, pretty self-explanatory stuff that you can play with. But for this one, I'm going to click on the individual select. You can name this property, so I'm going to call it year actually because that is what I need to add for my database. If you click on the year, you can actually edit property. This is where you can add options. For me, I started my business in 2019, so I'm just going to add all the years that I have been in business for. [NOISE] Wow, it is the fifth year now. [LAUGHTER] That's crazy. Yeah, so now that we have all these options, we can now go into here, and essentially, we'd be able to select one of these years. This is a year that I typically put when I signed the clients or maybe when I first met them or when they first reached out to me. Usually, that all happens within the same year, but I like to keep track of that date. Next, I'm actually going to put date because I like to jot down the day of our discovery call. By adding date here, I can actually go click on it and then I will basically input the date of when she reached out and we scheduled our discovery call. Next, I actually like to write down which service that they signed up for. If you are, let's say, a nutritionist, then you might want to jot down like what types of packages they signed up for. Or if you're a fitness instructor, maybe you have certain three-month, four-month, six-month retainers, and maybe you want to jot down what retainers they put down. If you're a copywriter, then maybe you have three different types of packages depending on the platform. Maybe you have blog posts and website post or whatever it is, and that might be what you want to put down. For my business, I have branding and websites, so I would typically choose multi-select because they can sign up for multiple types of services. I'm going to pick Multi-select and I'm going to call this Services booked. [NOISE] For my options, I am going to an option as full experience brand, full experience website and intensive. Just so you know here, if you click on these little three dots, it can also change the color. What else is next? Maybe you want to find out how they found you. I usually put this on my intake. On my website, I have a discovery form and I like to ask them, how did they find me? You can also use multi-select for this one. If it makes it easier, if people typically find you in the same spaces, then you can actually go to Type here and change this to Multi-select, and then you can add your options again. Maybe we have add an option, maybe there's Instagram, there's YouTube, there's referral. What else is next? I actually like to put down the country that they're from. Again, we can add those in US, Canada, Australia. Essentially, I would start with something like this. As you work with more clients, you're going to realize the questions that you ask them, what you need to jot down and you can keep building on this as you grow your business. For now, let's keep it as that. Let's create a new client as if maybe someone reached out and you are ready to input a new potential client in here. I'm going to call this client Susanna. When you click on Open, it's actually going to open this new space where you can type in even more information. Let's say you had a discovery call with her and you learn a lot of information, you want to take notes during the call. This is a space where you can do that or maybe they reach out by filling out a discovery form, and on that form, they shared with you their life story and you want to put that information somewhere just to make sure you have it on hand. This is where you can copy and paste that. I personally like to use this space here as a template so that I can write down all the notes of my discovery call with a potential client. I'm actually going to create a template here. In this template, I'm going to call it Discovery Call template. Basically, every time I open a new client, this template will open up to help me remember what I want to talk about on a client discovery call. Some things I might like to include in my template is the date of the call maybe, maybe the names of people on the call, maybe I want to write down what package they are interested in, maybe you want to write down the name of the company and the industry, Call Notes. During the call, maybe I'd like to take some notes in this space. I'm just going to add a little point form. That's how I usually like to take notes. Maybe I want to remind myself what questions I want to ask. Maybe like prompts, 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3. Just write it all out so that you remember you had these as like call notes during the call. Then maybe I want to write down what my packages are. Maybe you want to write down all of your packages out so that you remember your pricing and notes that you want to talk about during your discovery calls. But this discovery call template is complete now. I'm just going to click on back and that's going to save automatically. Now as you can see, there is this discovery called template that we can click on every time we start a new client. You can actually create multiple templates. If you have a discovery call for branding clients or website clients, or you want to differentiate the different types of discovery calls, you can do that. When you click on it, you're going to see this template pop up. Now we are ready to get on that discovery call. We're just going to head back into your client database here. Essentially, you have created your own CRM now. Now, in one glance, you can see all of your clients, past, current, and potential clients all in one space with all of their information filled out. Now, in the next lesson, we are going to be creating your internal project space. 5. Create an Internal Project Space: In this lesson, we are going to be creating your internal project space. Meaning, let's say you got on the discovery call with this potential client, you've inputted all of the information in your client database and the call went really well. Now the client comes back and they're like we're ready to work with you. Now you're going to want to create a little project space for this project so that you can write all of your notes moving forward for internal use only so that it's a space where your client can access. Let's get right into it. We are going to head back into your home dashboard and we're going to create a separate page called. Let's add the button and then click on Page and we're going to call this page projects database. We're going to again create an empty page. We're going to again add a database. We're going to click on the Plus button and we're going to scroll all the way down to where it says database, and we're going to click on Inline Database. Another way of pulling up this really quickly is actually to use what they say here, the forward slash, that one and you can type in anything. We're going to inline database and that's going to pop up. We can click on that and we're going to call this projects database. Now that we have this database setup, we're going to start inputting our properties again. We've done this before, so you know what to do. Again, I'm going to delete this tag because I don't find it helpful. Right now, just keep in mind this is your internal project space. What do you want to actually document and write down for every project that you're working on. I think this is pretty self-explanatory. This one is going to be the name. Again, I'm just going to use Susanna as an example. Something else that I like to put in this space is actually, status and we can change these statuses. I'm going to change the names of these so you can do not started in progress or done. Done for me would be like a completed projects. I'm actually going to name this completed. Maybe you want to say in progress is probably fine because that's a project that is in progress right now. This one needs to be up next maybe. What else would you want to put in your project's database? I like to actually put priority here. Maybe you're working multiple projects such time. Maybe you want to prioritize these projects. I'm going to go into edit property and I'm going to add Low, Medium, and High. Next up, you might want to put in what type of project you're working on. For me, I actually like to create this database for all of my different projects, including my client projects. I'm going to actually you can say branding or you can make this also multi-select as well, just like we did before. We can change this to multi-select for example, and for me, the types of projects that I might do is branding, website. You can be more as detailed as you need it to be. Sponsorships is something that I'm working towards and UGC. Those are all the different types of projects I might be working on. I'm going to add those in so then we can select them when we input a new client. Really you can add whatever you need for your projects. Just really think about it and work with it and adjust it as you need. When we are creating a new project, we're going to again input the name and then we can open it up and we can actually open again another project space. This project space again will be now your internal project space. For whatever you're working with, Susanna, this is going to be for your eyes only or for you and your team only. I actually like to create templates for this space as well. Again, we're going to create a template. What would we like to include in this template? I'm going to call this template the new project template. You can call it whatever you'd like. Maybe there's a certain type of project that you'd like to set up, then you can name it accordingly. For my template, I like to actually include things like my project scope. This reminds me what exactly we discuss will be part of the project. I actually like to add a little checklist here. I'm going to go to add and add a to-do list, and I'm going to add the project scope. Again, this is a template, but essentially when I start a new project, I'm going to use this space to type in five-page website or maybe they wanted three Instagram posts. Then I'm going to write all of those deliverables in here in this space so I can remember exactly what was said would be delivered in this project. Next, I like to actually include my expenses. For my projects, sometimes I hire contractors to help out with the project. For example, I might have my copywriter in here, so I would write down like, what exactly I need to hire for this project and the price that I agreed to pay for those project. I have all of my expenses here and one look, and I like to make these checkboxes because this reminds me if I've actually paid my contractor yet. If it's checked, it means that I've paid that portion already. You can use this in whatever way you like. But that's just an example of how you might want to use it. Next up, I like to just include a space to write any notes. You can even add a space for consultations. Maybe you are a fitness instructor and you have lots of consultations with your clients. What you can do is you can actually put, if you like, and actually add a little drop-down here. We're going to go add a toggle list and you can put down the appointment name. Let's say the call was today and this is where you can toggle out and it'll toggle up more information and you can put like notes here. This is just an example. Since this is a template, I'll put like consultation date. Then when the call happens, I'll put down the date and this is where I would basically put in notes from that call. This looks like a pretty great template. One thing that I haven't talked about yet, which we will learn in the next lesson is your client portals. We're actually going to be adding a new page here within the template for your client portal. I'm going to call this client portal template. In the next lesson, we are going to be filling out this client portal template. Before we go to that, I'm actually going to go back. Now you have your internal projects database to write down all of your notes going forward for that project. You can customize it as you see need for your project or for your business. It's really super customizable and personalizable for your business. Really think about what you need to jot down and include it within your internal project space. In the next lesson, we are going to be creating the first part of your client portal, which is your project resources. 6. Create a Client Portal: Project Resources: In this lesson, we are going to be creating your client portal. Now, this is going to be that collaborative space between you and your clients. It's going to house all of your project information, your resources, all of the back-and-forth communication, all of your project deliverables and feedback, as well as your project timelines. This part of the system will be split up into three different lessons. In this first lesson, we're going to be focusing on the first portion of your client portal, which is your project resources. Let's get into your dashboard now and in the last lesson, we were creating your project templates. I'm going to go back and do projects. We were creating a template. This is the template that we created just now. You can actually, if you wanted to edit your template, this is good to know in the future, is you can actually click on these three dots here and you can go to Edit and that's how you would bring back up an old template that you worked on. Let's say you wanted to make changes or updates to it. That's how you would bring it back up. This is the client portal that we were editing. Now we're going to actually go into it and edit this client portal. Again, I'm going to add a little emoji. I like to use this little dancing emoji here. You can use whatever makes sense. It might even be your client's logo or something that represents your client. Again, I'm just going to use the default like this graphic here because it looks really nice. We're going to click on an empty page and let's think about what you might want to put in your templates. I like to, in this very first part of your client portal, create a resources section. Actually before we start that, I'm going to let a couple of styling things that you can do on Notion. If you click on these three little dots here, you can change the font. There's like three types of fonts here. Sometimes I like to use this mono. I like to use small tax just because most of my pages have a lot of texts, so keeping it small works best. Then you can actually make it full width as well. That would actually make use up the whole page. If that is easier for you, for this client portal, you will want to use full width because there's going to be quite a bit of information here. In this first section here, this is just an example of what you might include in your resources section. But for my client portals, I like to have a section where I welcome my clients. I'm going to say a little like, hello, welcome to our client portal. Then I might do a little description, so description of what this space is all about. You want to just type that out and maybe you want to put like hello client name here. That is going to be like a little description here. This does look quite small, so I'm going to turn this into a bigger tax here so that it looks a little bit more profound. After this welcome message, I actually like to then create a space for where we can chat. I'm going to add a little message me here on the right hand side to send me a quick message. This will all make sense later, but we will add that chat in here too. I'm going to make this even bigger because I don't want it to be missed. If you want, you can change the color. We can change the color of any of these sections. You can even add your emoji there if you wanted to. But for now, I'm just going to keep that there for now. Now I actually want to create some different sections in this resources section. The first section here is I like to start here. Welcome video. If you double-click it, you can bold it and underline it. You clicking on these buttons right here, or just go to Command B and Command U. This is where I like to actually embed my welcome video that we will learn how to film at a later lesson. I'm just going to add here video. This is where you'll be able to embed your video. The next section I like to include typically is project details. Again, I'm going to bold it and underline it and you can also change the color here. I'm just going to change this here. Under product details, I like to put the start date or expected completion date. If you want. It's just like an overview, like let's say you have different parts of the project or maybe you have like a consultation call at some point. If you want, you can put those dates in there as well. Then another section I like to include is project deliverables. Again, I like to section these out with a little bit of styling here. For project deliverables, I actually like to make these into little checkboxes. Again, you can go to Add and then go to to-do lists. Then we are going to add like different types of deliverables. You can in this space, type it all out. Like if all of your projects have similar deliverable. For example, I might have like branding, like let's say five page website and copywriting. Those are like the main services that I have. If you have main services, then you might want to type those all out. The next section I like to include is our shared Google Drive folder. Again, this is very, very much personalized for me, but for every project that I work on, I always have some shared Google Drive so that they can send me documents and assets and then I can send them documents and assets. This is where I would paste that Google Drive link. Then the next section I like to include is useful resources. Then this is where I actually like to include different things like for example, I might create a page here and I'm going to call this page like how to provide effective feedback. That's something that's really important for me. I might write an article here or find an article online and copy paste it into this section so that they know like what's the best way to provide effective feedback. Super customizable. But some other sections I might like to include here might be my referral programs. Another section you might like to include is like maybe a testimonial section. You might want to put a space here and maybe put your Google, your business link in here. Or maybe you can just open up a space like for example it can be like write your testimonial here and then you can add a little call out. You can add this little pencil here. This is where basically they can type in their testimonial for you. Then the last section that I like to include here is actually my contact space. I like to call it contact Cheryl. This is basically just my office hours. If you need me, these are the days or times that I will be more responses. I'm just going to add that in. I like to actually create a little call out here and put a little push pin. This is basically just going to be like Cheryl's office hours. Sometimes I like to have my copywriter in here as well. Now you're probably thinking like there's so many sections, it's so not neat. This is where you can start styling this section now. We can do this and move this section back into here. Now we're going to do our second row and we're going to move this into here. You can really like stylists, whichever way fits best for your business. But for me, I feel like having three rows or three columns is actually the best way to view all of this information. Again, you can add more sections if you need to or replace these sections to something else. But essentially, this is going to be your resources section. The last thing we need to do here is actually create this chatbox. What you're going to do, you can do this wherever you like on Notion. If a client has a specific question on a specific line that you have later on that we create, they can make this comment as well. But I actually like to use this hack to create a little Chatbox like an instant message feature right on Notion. I'm going to go ahead and select this whole line here and I'm going to add a little comment. Just to show you how to do that again, you can click on any line here and click on comment here. It goes away if you don't actually comment something. We're going to write here, Hi clients. I can write the client or maybe just hi there. Respond to this message to ask me any questions regarding our project together. Then I always like to remind them to tag me, remember to tag me @Cheryl so that I get a notification. You can send this message. Now we have this little chatbox here which allows you to have basically instant messaging with your clients. If they have any general questions, I can just respond to this, tag you and you'll get a notification and you can start your two-way conversation there. This is the first part of your client portal. In the next lesson, we are going to be creating the next section of your client portal, which is your project phases. 7. Create a Client Portal: Project Phases: In this lesson, we are going to be building out the second portion of your client portal template, which is the project phases. In this section, you'll basically be grouping together different phases of the project at hand. It's where you'll be able to send over your client questionnaire. You can send over your deliverables to your client as well as they can fill out their feedback. Basically it's where the actual project will take place. The different phases of your project will obviously be so different depending on what your business does, who your clients are, what industry you're in. But let's just go over a couple of really more popular setups that I see and you can customize it to your own project needs. Let's get right into it. We are back in our client portal template and we're going to be creating this next section right here. So in this section we're going to add again a database. So if we go to database so far we've only played with basically like a database database [LAUGHTER], the one where you can put in different properties and stuff. But for this section, I actually like to use the gallery view. So we're going to make this into a gallery view and right here is where you're going to type in the name of this database. So we're not going to be selecting one from the past, we're actually going to be creating a new one. So I'm just going to type in, let's say project phases example. Oops. I'm going to create the new database and I'm going to click on new database right here. So for my business, I actually like to start off with a client questionnaire. So my first phase right here in this first image view will be the client questionnaire. The next section I like to do is usually my mood boards. So after the client questionnaire, I would provide a mood board to them and they will provide feedback. Because I'm a designer, like for most of my branding projects, they flow through the same way. So the next section I might be working on logos and assets, and the next one might be the brand board, and then finally they might have a wrap-up. Yours might be a little bit different. So let's say if you are someone who is a nutritionist or I don't know, a fitness instructor and you work by appointments or retainers, then your phases might be something like your one-week check in. It might be your five-week check-in and then you're one month check-in or whatever it might be. Then maybe you want to add one separate phase for the different appointments that you have. Or maybe it's a fitness plan, maybe you're working with your client on fitness and nutrition. So one section might be your fitness exercises, one might be your nutrition advice, one might be alternative practices or meditation things, whatever it might be, you really think about how you can separate out the different phases of the project that you're working on right now with your clients. So I'm just going to create some template sections to get things started and you can start thinking about what might be helpful for your projects. So one section that I find most clients or most service-based business owners will need, is probably some client questionnaire section. So remember, this is a template, so your client questionnaire here can be for example, what is your name? You can actually type this out here and have them fill it out right on notion. Or you can even create this on let's say a Google Doc and just embed it into the space, or just copy and paste the Google Doc link into here and they can fill it out from Google Docs. So I actually like to use everything within notions. So I actually create my questionnaire right in Notion, so it might be like, what is your favorite drink? Then your next question. So that is a popular setup. The next most popular setup is probably some sort of client deliverable and feedback. So for example, because I am a brand designer, I usually will maybe work on somebody's logo. So I typically like to create a space where I can design assets, download. I actually like to create a little toggle. Actually, why don't we name it that, Design Assets Download. Then we'll make this a little toggle. So this toggle allows you to show more information. So for example, this might be a link to the Google Drive where I link to Google Drive or whatever the link is. Then you have the option to toggle out the information just so it's a little bit more neat and tidy. Then maybe a different section might be like watch this loom video tutorial. But usually I would like to film these old loomed tutorials to basically go over the design assets that I have provided for them. If you'd like to do a little bit more styling, again, you can change the color of these just to make it a little bit more distinct. Then the next section I like to include is usually like a client feedback section. So and then this is basically where they would type their feedback. There we go. So this is a very typical setup for any kind of client deliverable and feedback. You can actually drag and drop your assets right into here. So let's say the assets that you're providing is a PDF or a picture or a graphic of some sort, you can actually drag and drop those assets right into notion. So if you want to put them here instead of a Google link, you can literally just drag those images in or drag the PDF in here, and this is where they would get the deliverable. Then, yeah, that is a very popular setup that I think most of you might be able to use. The next type of setup is maybe some project wrap up. So for most projects you probably need to wrap up the project. In this space, I like to provide all of the assets that were provided. So this might be like the Google Drive link just to remind them where they can download all of their assets. If you want, you can actually drag all of your assets, again into Notion because it does save it in high resolution if you have Notion pro. So that's one of the reasons why I'm on the pro plan. The next section might be a video tutorial. So for my branding clients, if I do a website for them, like I design their website, I like to actually film tutorials of how to use their new website moving forward or how to edit their videos moving forward. So I would basically embed all of the videos into this space. Then the next section might be to ask them to provide a testimonial. So again, really play with these spaces and customize it to whatever you need. The options and customization is limitless on notion which makes it the perfect space to be doing this. So you can make these as complicated or as detailed as you'd like them to. But my number 1 rule with notion is to keep things as simple as possible, straightforward as possible. It can get overwhelming really quickly in terms of all the different things that you can customize or change or make it look better. But really your client just wants an organized space to get the information for you and then provide their feedback. In the next lesson, we are going to be creating the last section of your client portal, which is your project timelines. 8. Create a Client Portal: Project Timelines: In this lesson, let's build out the last section of your client portal, your project timeline. This section is meant to help you and your clients really put all of those tasks that are part of the project into a calendar. This will help both you and your clients to see what will be accomplished during the project, see who's responsible for all of those tasks and when, and then also give you both a visual look into where those tasks will actually fall into place. Let's get right back into our client portal and we are going to be scrolling all the way down to the next section. In the next section here, we're now going to be adding again another project database. Do you remember how to do the shortcut? I'm going to forward slash, I think that's the word for it, and then we're going to put database. This is where it's going to come up. I'm going to call this project timelines. Or you can call this project deliverables, whatever you want to call it. Keep in mind, this is a template so for my projects that I worked on with my clients, it's really often that it's really the same task over and over again. That's how I've set up my project so that it makes it easier for me to replicate things per client. A lot of my project tasks are very similar for each project that I work on. Maybe you want to think about how to create these efficiencies within your business so that when you have similar tasks within each project with a client, that makes it a little bit easier to replicate and save you time. What are these different tasks? In this list, I'd like to add a property called task name. I like to add a property for the person that its task is for. Then I might make this like I can then tag whoever the task is for. So it's either for me or for my client or for my copywriter. The next thing is I like to link this to the project phase. For each of these phases, let's say this phase is the client questionnaire. I want to be able to link this to this phase so they can just click on that link and it'll bring them into this phase. What you can actually do is scroll all the way down to relation. I'm going to link it to this one right here. Project phases example. I believe it's this one. Now I'm going to add the relation. Now, let's say this task was to complete the client questionnaire. They can go in here and they can click on client questionnaire. Then let's go into the next line. We might want to put a note section. For example, if I assign this task for my client, like they have to fill out the questionnaire, this might be a space where I just add a little note like remember to do this as well. It's really up to you. Then the next space I'd like to add is whether it's completed or not, so completed. Then if they complete the task, they can just check this box off. Then next, you could maybe add a status. But I actually like to use the status bar to indicate, I'm actually going to, instead of using status, I'm going to use select. I'm going to call this status. I'm going to remove this one. I'm just going to call this again status. This is more of an internal thing just to help me filter things out. I like to add a property. I'm going to add this option as in progress and not in progress. The reason why I add these statuses here is because this project list can actually get pretty long. Like for each project there might be like thirty something tasks. It gets a little bit overwhelming if this line keeps going down and down. I actually like to only show what is in progress right now over the next few steps. By tagging it as in progress, I can then filter it out to view only the ones that are in progress. If I click on in-progress, as you can see, it didn't show the ones that are not in progress anymore. It's only going to show the ones that are in progress this way it gets a little bit less overwhelming, but this is really just a personal preference. You can use this any way you like, but that's how I use this in progress status property. Did we actually include a date? We did not. That's the most important thing, we need to include a date, so due date. This will tell us when the project is due and I'll probably put that here somewhere. Part of that. That's probably the second most important thing. Next up, let's put all of these tasks in a calendar view. What we're going to do is we're going to click on this plus bar. Instead of creating a separate new calendar view, I want it to be linked to this database. Whatever it shows on this due date here, it needs to also show on this calendar. What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to keep scrolling right here, linked view of database. I'm actually going to click on this one right here. I want to link it to this database. I'm going to click on that. Instead of viewing it in the same view, because right now it's still a database view, I'm going to edit the view right here by clicking on this right here, and changing this to the layout of calendar. You can do a bunch of different layouts. If you want, you can also do like a traditional project timeline view called timeline. But I actually personally like to see it in calendar view so I'm going to set it to calendar. If you want to test out the other views, that's fine as well. When I put a deadline now here, so let's say I put the deadline of today, It's going to show up in the calendar. So whatever this task is, let's just pretend this is like complete questionnaire. Now, this is going to show up here and the beauty about putting it in a calendar view, it actually makes it really easy to change the deadline. As you can see here, if I put it there, it's actually going to change the due date to the 16th instead of like editing it one-by-one. If you needed to change the date of this, you can just drag it over to another date. And I love that about calendar view. I like to have both views. This is more of a Hey, this is due, then they can check it off. Then they can also review the calendar to make sure that it works with their personal calendar. You can also use this as where you can put in your appointments. Let's say you have an appointment with them on the 21st, you can just double-click here and be like check-in call. Then you can put some notes there if you really wanted to. Then you can also add them. So we can go to people. Whereas the people on, task is for, and then you can add them into here and it will give them a reminder when that task is due. Use a space however you like. Obviously your project is going to be so different. But keep in mind right now that this is a client portal template so I would actually remove these dates right here because obviously every project will have a different timeline. I would type in all of your different tasks that are reoccurring for every project. Keep these things empty for now and then fill them in once you create a new client. Your client portal is now done. In the next lesson, we are going to be linking some of these databases together. 9. Linking Databases Together: In this lesson, we're going to make sure that the two databases that we just created are linked together. I am going to head back into my home dashboard, and here we have our client database and our project database. We're going to make sure that both of these are linked together. I'm going to head into client database first and I'm going to add a property and I'm going to go to relation, and I'm going to look up that database. I think it's right here, project's database example and I'm going to add relation. Now when I add Susanna to my client database, I can link it to her project. So I'm going to look up Susanna here and that will be now linked to the Susanna project. Let's head back to project database, and we're going to do the exact same thing. We're going to add a property. We're going to add a relation here, and I'm going to link it to the client database example here. Link it to whatever your database was. Again, I can now link it to the Susanna clients. Every time I create a new project or a new client, I can then access their project or their clients space accordingly. It makes it super easy, like let's say I am punching in Susanna here. I can actually just go ahead and click on this. I will head into Susanna's project space. That is it and in the next lesson, we are going to be going over my client management workflow. 10. My Client Management Workflow: In this lesson, we are going to be going over my client management workflow. You're actually going to get a pick into my actual database here on Notion and we're going to go through every single step as if I was starting a new client right now. Let's pretend that just got an email from a potential client from Instagram. They found me on Instagram and they filled out my contact form on my website and I have a discovery call that I have scheduled for tomorrow with her, so I want to set her up. Let's head into my client database. I have lots of different clients here. I particularly have the client name, the year that they reached out to me or that I'm working with them, I have the date of the discovery call, the status of the project, the project link, so that it is linked to the project space, the packages that they have booked, how they found me, so which platform that they find me from, which country they're from, their time zone and who the referral was. I am ready to punch in a new client now, so I'm going to go all the way to the bottom and we are going to create a new clients. What should we call this client today? I'm going to call her Lady Rose Client. That's what I'm going to call her. I'm going to punch in a couple of things, so we have I met her this year and right now I haven't filtered to by the year, so she's actually showing up. There she is. We have the date, so we have tomorrow is the discovery call. It is not booked yet. It is still someone that I am pursuing. We don't have the project space yet because the client hasn't booked yet and then she's interested in a full brand, but she hasn't booked it yet, so I actually don't want to fill that out and then it's by Instagram. She found me through Instagram. She is American and she's living in New York and that's it. I am going to open up this client and I am going to click on discovery call template because I am heading on this discovery call with her and I want to make sure that I am ready. I'm going to open up this discovery call template and these are some of the questions that I typically ask. Personally, I don't really use these anymore. I use them a lot in the beginning of starting my business because I wanted to feel ready. But this is just an example of the different things that are included in my packages and my process. All handy here for me to make sure that I have it on hand and then a lot of times I'll just write my call notes here. Every call is different and so I like to make that space custom for that client. Once I am ready to, let's say she's like gets on this call, she's palm, she's like, let's start this project, so I'm going to look for her and we are going to start this project. Let's look for her here. I'm going to create a new project space for her. You can actually do that right in your client dashboard. If you click on the relation here, which is your project relation, I'm going to click on here and obviously I haven't made a project for her yet, so I can actually create the project right in this space here, so I'm going to Lady Rose branding and I'm going to add this new project. It's actually going to create a brand new project space for her. I'm going to click into that, and I'm going to click into that project space now and I'm going to click on my new client template of 2022. Perfect. I'm just going to fill out some of these things here and this is going to automatically create a new project in your project database. Right now this is ongoing. Next steps, let's say the priority is high as we're starting tomorrow, we have eastern time and that is good. I'm just going to write down like we are doing a full branding for this project and a one-page website for this project. I'm going to actually be bringing in my copywriters so copywriting included, and I'm going to put in my prices, whatever it is. These aren't my actual prices, but just to drop that down and maybe I pay my copywriter $800 for this project. I need to make sure that I take note of that. I actually like to put down all my client login information because I'm a website designer, so I usually have their Canva account, their website login and domain login, all of that and then if I have any client calls, I actually like let's say after the project assign, I'm actually going to have a call with her on the 10th and I'll just use this space to write any notes for that client call. Because this was a template, the client portal has already been created, so we're going to head into her client portal and this is where I am going to now adjust this for this client so we have Lady Rose. I'm going to call this Lady Rose HQ and I'm going to put her name here, Lady Rose and I already have my welcome message here to welcome her and tell her what's going on. This is going to be the messaging area. Again, I'm going to create a comment here and we're going to say, hi there, message me back to ask any general questions about the project. Remember to tag me at my name and then I'm going to send that. Then in the next lesson, we're actually going to learn how to film this welcome video. But once that video is filmed, we're going to embed it into this space right here. The start date of the project is, let's say this date and then we're going to fill out those details, those project includes whatever it is so I can adjust those. Then I'm going to actually add my Google Drive link here, so I'm going to grab that link right now, but when you paste a link in notion, you have the option to embed or bookmarks. Usually I like to embed so that there's a little linked space there and they can just click on this and that will link to the shared Google Drive. Make sure to actually share the drive with them. These are the different useful resources section that I've created. This is my how to provide effective feedback section. I have a little section on a little checklist before they launch their website, my referral discount, a space to add their testimonial and then a link to a VIP day which is only available to my past clients, and then here's my office hours section. Then there's nothing to adjust there. In the next section, I'm going to go through these phases. Every project has pretty much the same phase so there's not really much for me to adjust here, but if you need to adjust it per client, then feel free to do that. I'm going to go through my timeline here, and we're just going to look at all the different tasks. Right now there is a filter, so I'm going to remove this filter so I can see all of the different tasks, and I'm just going to make sure that all of these are still relevant for this project and if you want, you can see what I mean by if you just do like unfiltered, there could be so many tasks and it's overwhelming. Having this filter really helps with this status bar so I'm going to add that filter back in. I'm going to go to status and only in progress. We can actually view this by calendar view as well so in the next session, we have our calendar view and we can start punching those dates in. Let's say right now it's February 8th so I'm going to put that date in here and I'm just going to populate all of those dates so that the client can then see all of the different tasks that are due during that times. That is it. After I complete that section, I can then add my client in here. I'm going to go to share and I'm actually going to punch in their email right here and invite, and that's going to actually invite them as a guest into this client project portal. That is my full client project workflow. I hope it was super insightful to see how I use the system for my business. I would love to see how you then take the system to use it for your business so be sure to remember to take a screenshot or send us a link to your client portal and share it in the project section. Now in the next lesson, let's go over how to film your welcome video for your client. 11. Film a Welcome Video: In this lesson, let's film your welcome video for your client portal together. Now the platform that I use to film any of my videos, including this video right here is Loom. It is a paid service, they do have a free plan as well as a business plan. I recommend going on the business plan if you're using it to film these tutorials and if you're using it to film client-like feedback and deliverables and stuff, because on the free plan you only get five minutes of a video recording time and on the paid plan you get unlimited. These tutorials might take a little bit more than five-minutes. Feel free to try use a free plan if you can keep it to five-minutes if that works for you, or use any platform that allows you to film your screen as well as I personally like to have a little bubble so that it can just be a little bit more personalized experience for each of your clients. Now I'm going to include my Loom referral link in the class resources PDF, so if you want to head to that link to sign up for loom, then go ahead and find that link there. But the main purpose of this lesson is to figure out all of the talking points that you need to include within your welcome video. Let's head to our client portal and let's review all those talking notes. We are back at our client portal template here, let's just pretend that you are starting a new project now, and you want to film this video. What do you want to include in this actual video? First off, you want to make sure that you include some welcome message in the video. You want to make this a personalized experience. You're introducing your client for the first time into the space, so you want to make it feel very customized and warm, especially if you are an international, if you're working with international clients, like for me, I live in Amsterdam and most of my clients are actually North American based and I'll never be able to see them in person. We might have a couple of Zoom calls here and there, but having this welcome video to welcome them into your project space just creates a little bit more personalization. Say welcome, explain what this portal is for basically just like whatever you write here. Tell them that this is a space for you to host everything regarding your project. It's where communication for your project will be moving forward. There's no need for email anymore. You can do quick messaging right on notion. This is where they will go back for everything project related. The next thing you want to make sure to include is your notion settings. This might be the first time that your client is usually notions, so they might be a little confused in terms of how to navigate notion and stuff. You want to make sure to tell them that there are actually two ways to use Notion, you can either use it on the web, they can open it as any website. If they want to use it for web, they can save this in their favorites or something so that they can head back to this space really easily. If they're using the app version, you can recommend them to use the app version, which is what I usually use, and what you're seeing here. Then just make sure to send them the link of where they can download the Notion app. It's free it depending on which computer they use. Then when they open up Notion, they can hit into their navigation here. If they click on, it will say their name like whatever their name is, Notion space, they will have to head into your Notion space to open up this client portal space that you both have access to. That's some quick notes of how to use Notion. The other thing is to make sure that you tell them about the notification settings on Notion. If you head into your settings and members here, you can head into notifications. Here you just want to make sure to tell them to turn all of these on. This way, they will always get a notification from Notion, if you have any updates for them or if you tag them in something, then this ensures that they don't miss any communication from you regarding the project. Next up, you're going to explain them about the space that they're seeing. You can tell them this first section is all about your project resources. You can tell them this is the welcome video that you're watching, and right here, when they click on this, they're going to see this little chatbox here. Just tell them that this is where you will be able to exchange conversation moving forward. Instead of using email, all of the communication can happen in one place. Just remind them to tag you and any general project questions they can ask you right here. Then you can just talk through these different spaces here. Whatever you have in your resources section, just make sure that if there's important things that you want to call out, just call out to them. Then in the next section you want to just explain to them what this project phases section is. Maybe show them an example of how to provide feedback. Let's say this is an example you can open up, show them what a toggle is. By clicking on this triangle, you're going to show more information. Then you can tell them, this is where you'd be providing feedback to me. Just type into the space. One thing about Notion that's annoying as if you hit "Return," you'll see that it leaves the box. You just want to tell them to hit "Shift Return." That actually creates a new line, but still within the nodes. It's insignificant, but if you want to keep things a little bit more organized, that's a little notion know that you might want to tell them. Then you can tell them about the product timelines. These are all the different tasks that are part of our project and all the due dates are now on this calendar and just tell them to review this calendar to make sure that if there's anything that is required of them to provide feedback for, make sure to check your calendar to see if it works for them still. This is a great space to just reconnect with them. Be like, "Hey, this is my expected timeline for our project, just make sure you let me know ahead of time if you can't hit those deadlines." Make sure that the project keeps going in whatever capacity that you both have. Then you just want to wrap up the video, be like, "hey, I want to thank you so much for signing on to be one of my clients" or whatever you want to say, just wrap up the video with a thank you and welcome them into your new client portal. Just remind them that you can always be reached through this chatbox and you're excited to start your project. Once you are ready to film, just turn on Loom or whichever platform you're using and record a way. If you're using a platform like Loom, it will create a video link for you, and all you have to do is copy and paste that link and paste it into your start here "Welcome videos section." Right here is where you can basically paste that video link and your video will be embedded in this space so they can watch this video before they start working with you on your client portal. That's it. 12. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Thank you so much for taking this class and I just wanted to congratulate you for completing it. I remember when I first started setting up this system for my business, I was so excited about all the different possibilities of how I can customize it exactly for me and my business and my clients and I'm just really hoping that by taking this class, it has really sparked that same motivation and excitement for you as well. But I do also understand how notion can get a little bit overwhelming sometimes because of all those ways that you can customize it. My tip at this point is really just to keep it simple and focus on the usability of your system first. Trust me, over time, you will learn how to improve it as you work with it with more client projects. Start simple and build to improve it later. I hope you'll also consider sharing your custom client portal that you've created in the project section. I really look forward to seeing all of the creative ideas on how you've adapted my system for your business. Just take a screenshot of it, share it, and remember to let us know what your business does. Be sure to check out my other classes here on Skillshare by following my teacher profile. You can also check out some of my free video content all about creative entrepreneurship on my YouTube channel made on Sundays or you can message me directly if you want to connect with me personally on Instagram @made on Sundays studio. Good luck with your setup and I'll see you soon. Bye. [MUSIC]