So, here it is Thing #1 - Automated Diary Booking which is essential so that:
As I mentioned in the introduction, these things are going to be VERY practical but will save you an absolute ton of time and hopefully enable you to earn more money doing what you love!!
I thoroughly recommend getting yourself signed up with Acuity Scheduling so you never miss an appointment again.
Yes, Acuity Scheduling offers a free trial so you can test out all the features before committing. You get a full 7 days to explore the platform, play around with bookings, send yourself reminders, and see how it works with your calendar. This gives you plenty of time to decide which plan fits your needs, whether you’re managing your own schedule or juggling appointments across a whole team. No risk, no fuss, just a great way to see if Acuity makes your life easier before you sign up for good.
There will be more Things coming so watch this space.
I work through Acuity in the video however there are several other great diary booking tools including:
Acuity Scheduling offers a range of plans designed to suit different needs, whether you’re a solo operator or managing a larger team. Here’s a quick look at what’s available:
All plans are priced monthly, with a discount if you choose to pay annually, and pricing is in USD. Plus, regardless of which option you choose, you’ll be free from the frustrations of double-booking and chasing clients, leaving you more time to focus on what you’re best at.
One of the main reasons I love Acuity is the simple integration with my Office 365 calendar, so when I put something in my calendar it blocks it out in Acuity and vice versa, when someone books through Acuity it automagically adds the appointment into my calendar.
Not only that but you can also integrate it with other 3rd Party apps such as Zoom - to automagically create a Zoom meeting and URL when someone creates a new appointment, and if they opt into my mailing list to add them automatically to MailChimp for me.
Both of which saves a huge amount of time.
Finally, Acuity sends out confirmation emails and reminder emails (and SMS reminders), which means I can send prospects homework ahead of our call and also ensure that people show up to calls at the right time. No Excuses!!
Stay Fearless!
Robin
Founder of Fearless Business
P.S. This is part of the 10 Things That Every Business (Owner) Needs Series, if you'd like to subscribe and see the other 9 things hit the link below:
https://www.fearless.biz/10-things
So this thing that I'm about to show you is absolutely vital for any business to have in place, especially if you're a service/client business, whereby you're booking clients into meetings, running coaching calls and strategy sessions.
What I'm about to show you in a second, and I'm going get screen share up in a moment, but what I'm about to show you has saved me absolutely countless hours of time and stress and energy.
I'd imagine a lot of you may well already have the thing that I'm about to show you in place already, but if you don't, then this is going to massively revolutionise how you deliver your product or service to your clients.
What I'm actually talking about is some kind of automated diary booking or diary management tool.
There's quite a few different ones out there. The one which I use is Acuity Scheduling, and I'll hop onto a screen share in a second and show you around some of the inner workings of how I organise my diary booking.
A couple of other ones that you can use, I think, there's also Calendly, ScheduleOnce. They're probably the two of the most popular ones. Google and Microsoft Outlook and Office 365 also have their own versions as well. But I'm a big fan of Acuity.
Heard good things about ScheduleOnce and Calendly. So those are really the three key options.
You may well have, or if you go out and look for them, you'll find other diary booking options.
But one of the reasons why I find that diary booking is so, so important is to avoid this kind of diary ping-pong which you get. So somebody says, "Hey, shall we meet up for a coffee?" or "I'd love to have a consultation with you" and you send them across some dates, and they say, "Oh no I can't do any of those, I'm away," and then you get this back and forth.
And not only that but then once you've had actually managed to lock down a specific date and time in the diary, and the day and time comes round, and you check your diary and you go, "Oh goodness, when was I supposed to be meeting Dave?"
So this whole process of actually getting it, like automatically into here, so that it pops up with reminders, and tells you when you should be going to appointments and things like that.
Also, just not missing appointments, not for you, but for your clients as well. So with Acuity, you get things like, it sends out email reminders automatically. It can send out SMS reminders so that your clients never miss their meetings with you as well, which is super-important.
What I'm going to do, I'm just going to flip across into screen cast mode and put a little version of myself up here so you can see me while I'm talking. I'm only talking over there because the screen's over there.
So this is just a basic version of my site as it's set up at the moment. When somebody clicks on the book a call, one of the first things they get is this neat little form just here where they can select their diagnostic call. You can actually put different appointment types in there.
I'm going to show you that in a second.
One of the best bits is that clients can easily view my real-time availability and self-schedule appointments at their convenience. No more endless email chains or “are you free on Tuesday at 2?”, they simply see the slots I’ve made available, pick what works, and they’re in. If you’re managing multiple locations or have a team, you can tailor the calendar so clients only see the schedules you want them to see, keeping everything streamlined and avoiding confusion.
People can see my availability, they can click on next Tuesday at whatever time suits them. Pop their information in. I've got an application form which I'm going to be speaking about possibly a bit later on, oh, I'll talk about it now actually.
If you're in a service-based business and you want to ensure that you're getting good quality appointments booking in your diary, it's really worthwhile having an application form. I'll show you how you set that up in Acuity in a second. I ask them some very pointy questions about what people's offer is, how much they're currently earning, what their monthly target revenue is, what they feel is the biggest obstacle for hitting that goal, and a few other pointy questions.
Then they click complete appointment.
Now what I'm actually going to do is go through and book an actual appointment, then you can see what happens really. If I hit 11:30, continue, wrong weight, blah, blah, blah. Now, unfortunately, all of these need to be filled out, these questions, so we'll just put in some.
There we go. Complete appointment.
So, great, now that's already been confirmed. Straightaway, your client can click on Add to iCal or Outlook, or Add to Google.
The other cool thing that's going to happen, straightaway here, first and foremost, I get a confirmation email, which is sent out through Acuity, and again, I'll show you, so here we go.
I just get a copy of it. This is what the client sees.
Hey, Robin, just wanted to let you know we've received your application. Here's a couple of pre-call bits of homework that I want you to do. Down here, here's confirmation of the appointment.
There's a link to cancel or change the appointment, add it to iCal. You've also got the iCal thing here.
And actually, if I go into my diary for next Tuesday now, you can see here, that obviously this is confidential, of course, but you can see here, it added in this diary entry that I just put for 11:30 on Tuesday, which is pretty cool.
Let's see, where are we at now? That's cool. You've got the option here, you can just cancel it, so we could just go in and cancel it straight out, if we wanted to, or reschedule it, or edit the form.
We're just going to cancel that. And bang, done.
And also what will happen is as soon as that cancelled, it will drop back out of my diary automatically.
Now, one of the clever things with Acuity is how it deals with time zones. Let's say you’ve got clients in New York booking in your London calendar (or, frankly, just about anywhere in the world, looking at you, Australia). The system automatically detects where each person is and shows them your available times in their own local time zone, no mind-bending maths or frantic Googling “BST to EST” required.
So, if someone in San Francisco wants to book a 3pm session with you, it’ll only let them choose from your actual availability, adjusting everything behind the scenes. No risk of that classic “wait, did they mean 2pm my time or theirs?”, it’s simply all seamless, and everyone ends up where they should be, at the right time.
No more calendar confusion or awkward double-bookings, just everyone clearly on the same page, wherever that page happens to be.
So first things first. You can see here there's an option to sync with other calendars. All I've done, is I've just synced to that. When you come down to my account, obviously, these are my team, you come down here, we can sync it up with my Office 365 calendar, block off any time in Acuity from Calendar.
It's two-way syncing. If I mark something out as busy in my phone, and my torch is on, I don't know why, if I mark something out as busy on my phone, it automatically makes that appointment slot unavailable on Acuity, so people can't actually book, which I think is pretty cool.
The other thing is you can have a number of different appointment types.
What you've just seen there is the first part of my inquiry process, so it's a diagnostic call booking, but also you see some other ones here which I've got set up. Podcast interviews, we've got diagnostic follow-up, we've got a three-core pillar offer call, that's what John does with clients when they first join Fearless Business.
Got a couple of other things here for other programmes, for one-to-one clients, people who want to book a Breakthrough session meeting, things like that.
You've got a number of different appointment types, and then in terms of setting availability, it's actually really, really simple. I just go and select myself.
Here we go. Then we've got various different appointment types in terms of groups. So I've got all of my initial inquiry ones all grouped together here. I've got some pre-defined times set in my, set available. Every week, at the same times, on Mondays and Wednesdays, I have these two call slots available.
What I can also do in this calendar, I can go in and add some extra ones if I want to you can see here on the 19th, for example, I've added in some extra, sort of bonus, slots that people can book. What I tend to do is I'll edit this once a week for the next week, 10 days ahead, so that people can, to open up some extra availability in my diary, if need be, if I can see that slots are starting to get filled up.
I can open up more, more opportunities. The other thing, though, is, and I find this super, super helpful, in terms of the intake forms, I've got this application form here. It's like a very simple WYSIWYG drag-and-drop type interface for creating forms. You've also got email settings.
This is where it sends out the reminders and things like that. I've set one up for, here we go, for diagnostic calls, so you'll see that email, which I showed you, which popped into my inbox, this is how we edit it, with the confirmation stuff in there. Then what you can also do is send out reminders.
At the moment, I've only got two. I've got one which is 48 hours in advance, and here it is, so again, this is just a reminder, this is just letting people know that when they book the call, it's going to be through Zoom. They need to make sure that they go and download the app on the phone or the computer before we chat.
Also, remind them to fill out the Fearless Business quiz. Again, a reminder with the opportunity to change or cancel, or add it to their Outlook calendar. Then the same thing goes out again 24 hours before, so that the client gets a consistent onboarding sequence.
We're giving them a bit of pre-education before I even speak to them. It's super-effective. It just means that the client is already pre-warmed to us before we even get on to the call. We've been able to start to qualify them and things like that.
But the key thing is, is that the client is in control all the way through this.
They get to choose when they book, they get the opportunity to add it into their calendar, I get all of the reminders so I'm not going to drop the ball either.
It goes into my calendar automatically.
Then also the client gets both email and SMS reminders in advance of their call. There's no excuses, there's no reasons why they wouldn't be able to book.
Now I'll be honest, it is a little bit clunky in terms of setting this up initially. But once it is set up, actually, it works incredibly well.
You saw how easy it was for somebody to go into my diary and book a call with me, obviously provided they pass the application process. So there's absolutely no excuses there. I think if people are still running manual diaries, you're absolutely daft.
I'm going to give you a couple of other tips around how to, the metrics you need to be working to, in terms of your diary and consultations and things like that a bit further down the line.
But I think if you get Acuity set up, ASAP, it should just be like every business should have automated diary booking, sorry, every service-client business should have automated diary booking in some way, shape, or form.
If you don't, if you're struggling on the tech side of things, go and find somebody to help you. This stuff isn't overly complicated, but if you get a little bit stuck or you need help embedding it on your website, for example.
The other cool thing is you can just send people a link directly from Acuity. It doesn't necessarily need to be embedded on your website.
There's always a way around this to hack it or shortcut it to make sure that it's as easy as possible for people to access your stuff.
Anyway, I thoroughly recommend, go set up Acuity, or ScheduleOnce, or Calendly. They all work in a similar way.
Make sure it's hooked up to your Google calendar or Outlook.
Then set up the very specific appointment types, set up the reminders, and that will definitely save you an awful lot of time, hopefully stop you from dropping the ball.
Who knows, you may end up getting more clients as a result of just having this one simple piece of automation in place.
One other brilliant feature with Acuity (and with alternatives like Calendly or ScheduleOnce) is the ability to take payments right as clients book their appointments. This includes everything from collecting deposits up front, so you’re not left chasing flaky no-shows, to accepting tips straight through the booking process if your business calls for it. You can set it up to capture payment in full, a percentage deposit, or just secure a credit card, giving you loads of flexibility depending on how you like to work.
No more pestering for payments over email or awkward cash situations at the end of your session. Everything’s handled online, smoothly, and you can even send out receipts automatically. All in all, it’s another level of automation that makes your client experience slick and professional, while making sure you actually get paid for your time.
If you ever run into a hitch (or just have one of those “where’s that button?” moments), there’s plenty of help at hand. Acuity offers several ways to get support:
Currently, Acuity focuses its support resources on users in major regions like the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. So, if you’re in one of those places, you’re well covered.
And for those who like to do their homework, you can always check out trusted third-party reviews. Many users rate their support around 4.3 out of 5, which is pretty solid in this game.