Are you a creative person?
Whether your answer was an instinctive 'YES (or a suspiciously quick 'no'), then I invite you to tune into this conversation.
‘Cause somewhere along the line, we were sold that creativity is messy and chaotic and that systems look like boring, rigid, soul-sucking spreadsheets…
And Harriet and I are here to flip that right-brain vs. left-brain script!
In this episode, we’re pulling creativity and systems out of their opposite corners of the ring and letting them work together: since that’s when brands & client experiences become spotlight-worthy.
We talk about how systems can be playful, how data fuels better creative decisions, and why the best client experiences don’t come from doing more, but from designing smarter, clearer & more human processes.
From onboarding emails that don’t suck the joy out of your brand, to automations that hype YOU up as much as your clients, if you’ve ever felt like you had to choose between being organised or creative, this one’s for you.
Before we could dive into the good stuff, Harriet had to pass the freak audition by stating three things that qualify her as a freak:
Safe to say, Harriet's fully certified as a freak.
Harriet and I actually met through a Ceels Lockley event, and we immediately bonded over something surprising: how much our creative design world and her systems world have in common.
I always grew up being told that creativity and data are polar opposites. You're either good at art or good at numbers. But when I got into the real world of running a business, I realised that most things that work well blend both.
And yet people still put them side by side as opposites instead of blending them together!!
For instance, Harriet is still being creative in the systems she produces. The visual outcome isn't the same as design work, but creating solutions for clients, thinking through different options on calls, figuring out the best way to structure a process… That's all creative work!
Which, by the way, Harriet struggled with growing up. She spent years thinking she wasn't creative at all because she couldn't draw. And that belief bled into her business, so she found it really hard to market herself, to stand out visually, to do anything that felt "creative".
Until she realised creativity isn't about the medium. It's about the muscle.
I usually think of creativity as a muscle we all have, and some people just flex it more than others. That whole "I'm not creative" or "I wasn't born creative" thing is like saying "I wasn't born active" (which, as we saw before Harriet sure is). Sure, maybe you don't love the gym, but you can go if you choose to. You can build that muscle.
Even if you don't think you're creative, you probably have creative tasks on your to-do list like social media, writing copy, and designing graphics.
Harriet struggled with this for a while. She actually outsourced her copywriting early on because writing felt so hard. But then she watched how the copywriter worked — taking stories from Harriet's business and turning them into emails and sales copy — and realised it was a skill she could practice.
Now she enjoys writing her newsletters. It's not that she suddenly became a different person. She just practiced the muscle.
As a designer who loves organisation and automation, I'm constantly signing up for new tools, setting them up, and then thinking "none of this is doing exactly what I wanted" before abandoning ship and keeping everything as it was.
Harriet sees this all the time. People are like magpies: we've got so many options out there, and we don't stick with a tool or system long enough to decide if it's right for us before we see something shiny and new.
So how do you decide whether to stick it out or swap?
It depends on what you actually need the tool to do. Before you jump to the next shiny thing, ask yourself: what do I need something to do for me or for my clients? Does this tool tick those boxes?
Notion might look really great (and it is a good tool!), but if it doesn't do what you need it to for your specific process, it's not the right fit. No matter how many people rave about it.
Also, Harriet asks a super important question: "Do you like being there?"
If this is a tool for your client management or project management, you're going to be in it every day, so you need to like being in it. The feeling matters just as much as (maybe more than) the features themselves.
When Harriet asks her clients how they onboard people once they're booked and paid, most people say they send one big email with a whole load of tasks: fill this in, book this, send me this, read this document...
But Harriet recommends you break it down.
When someone first books with you, they're excited. They're thinking, "What happens now? What's next?" So don't overwhelm them with 15 tasks! Send a short & punchy welcome email that gets them to book the kickoff call. Booking a call takes 2 seconds, so it's an easy win.
Once the call is booked, THEN you can send the homework. It's important that this email includes clear instructions: complete this form by X date / 2 days before our call. Get everything in a form if you can, link to a Google Drive for assets, use your Notion form, whatever. Just don't make them hunt through an email for all the questions.
Then you might have follow-up emails: a reminder if they haven't completed the form, a confirmation once they have, and the link to your client portal if you use one.
That's 4 emails in the onboarding sequence, each with one clear task.
The goal is to keep the dopamine hits coming. It makes the whole process feel manageable instead of like a mountain of admin.
Recently, Harriet was in a client's Dubsado system and saw that the confirmation email when someone booked a call was just... the default text Dubsado supplies.
Zero personality or branding! GASP.
When we're setting up automations, we get so focused on how we're sending things and making sure the automation works that we forget to inject any personality into those emails.
The most neglected emails are confirmation or reminder emails for calls, but they're such a golden opportunity to make your brand stand out and sound like YOU!
You don't need to make it over-the-top. At the core, it's still a call confirmation email. But showing that you cared enough to customise it is part of customer care, and therefore client experience.That's what makes you stand out in someone's inbox, even after they've already booked with you.
So why does all this matter? Why invest the effort to reword emails, add personality, customise the boring system defaults?
Because most likely them not, you genuinely care about your people. Your community is really important to you, and so is your reputation. Yes, we want to save time with automation because it saves more headspace.
But adding personality shows you care.
It means your clients have a more immersive experience with you. They're more engaged with what you're sending and how you're saying it. They're more likely to tell their friends about the actual journey with you, not just the end result.
They're not just saying, "Look at my amazing website!" They're saying, "Look at my amazing website, and Eva was the best person to work with ever. She made everything so easy. It was really fun. I totally understood where I was at every step of the way. I just felt like I was really in her world!"
When people say referrals aren't reliable as a lead generation system, I'd argue that if you think about your client experience (the care you're providing throughout the process) that in itself is a referral system.
It helps you stand out as someone more interesting to work with. It gets people hyped up who haven't even started working with you yet. They've paid the deposit, and now they're excited to actually do the work with you, not just waiting for the end result.
Which is kind of a weird thing to say when we're talking about automations, right? But that's the magic. It doesn't have to be one or the other.
Before I let Harriet go, I had to ask: what's one business take you refuse to back down from?
Creating systems isn't about saving you time and creating automations. It's about helping you create systems that work for YOU: that build your reputation, that are fun to deliver, that you actually like using.
Not just because they save time, but because they're you. Because they give you headspace to do better work for your clients and more of what you enjoy.
A lot of systems people lean heavily into the automation side. But Harriet would rather do something manually than have an automation in place that doesn't actually help her deliver a system she loves.
It's not about time. It's about headspace.
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Client Experience Expert
Over the last 5 years as a Brand & Marketing Designer, I’ve helped freaks like us design their unconventional brands so they can step onto the main stage & own their weird. Because if you wanted to be, look or sound like everyone else, you wouldn’t be where you are today. Now it’s your turn.
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