Saving hundreds of hours on client admin with Notion

This is one of the best kept secrets among my freelance friends.

It has saved them hundreds of hours, helped close more deals and made their clients happier. Their work is more organized, documented, thoughtful.

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Yes. They use Notion to collaborate with their clients.

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My friends Jonno, Alex and Valentin use Notion as more than just a nice note taking app. A Notion page, when shared with others, acts as a CRM, a project management tool, a fully-fledged client portal. Instead of sending multiple word documents and pdfs over email, they just send a Notion link.

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Here's how it goes.

Client Baguette wants a new website and sends a proposal request to Jonno. After a short video call, Jonno sends a Notion page link. It includes:

• a grid of his latest portfolio work

• a page about how he works

• notes from their first meeting

• a list of expected deliverables

• a quote and what the next steps are

The page is customized to the client's brand. The emojis make the client feel like home. With a short embedded Loom video, Jonno presents his proposal and shares his excitement. Client Baguette has received 3 other proposals. But this one stands out. It's clear, personal, professional. They agree to work with Jonno.

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Client work is constantly reinventing the wheel, starting over for every new client. Updating your portfolio with relevant work, designing a new proposal, creating a new dropbox... Notion makes this onboarding a breeze. The relief of not having to think about the low-level stuff feels good.

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And though it seems Jonno has worked several hours on this proposal, it took him 5 freaking minutes. The proposal is part of a "new client” template he built in Notion. Talk about time savings.

With the same disconcerting ease, he adds a Service Level Agreement, a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and an invoice to Baguette's page, with Notion templates he built.

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All the docs are here, can be updated instantly and exported to PDF. Not only is that useful for the client, Jonno has these docs integrated into his process.

Cherry on the cake: he embeds Figma and Whimsical designs straight into the page and 💥 you have a client dashboard. This is a portalfolio built in 5 minutes.

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Here's how all the docs are structured

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Supercreative's goal is to give creatives superpowers. This is it. This is one hell of a superpower right here. Open Notion, create a database, add a template, add a client, and share the link.

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Great Notion templates will save you hundreds of hours, but setting them up takes a very long time. High upfront cost, high future reward. 

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Inspired by my designer friends, I built my own Notion templates and have been using them with my clients for a few months now. Recently, I realized it could help hundreds of other freelancers. 

So I spent the last month creating the master template for client collaboration. In fact, it’s a pack of templates; a group of documents that include everything you would need as a professional freelancer. 

Invoices, proposals, SLAs, NDAs, moodboards, you name it. All exportable as PDF or sharable to use the full power of Notion collaboration. I’m calling it the Notion Pack. 

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My freelancer friends who use Notion and have read this article are unhappy. One of them has asked me to unpublish it. They’re a bit pissed. Understandably so: they're losing a secret competitive advantage. 

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