<aside> 💡 *Mindmaven is an executive coaching firm that's spent the last 15+ years working with hundreds of leaders, including unicorns like Reddit, Roblox and Thumbtack, as well as heavy hitters such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark, and First Round Capital.
Mindmaven drives greatness by unleashing three key executive superpowers: Leverage, Intent, and Fellowship. With Leverage, you'll free up 12+hours of your time each week by fundamentally changing how you work with your EA/Chief of Staff. With Intent, we'll enable you to become more proactive and highly-focused on growth, mastery, and the things that matter most. With Fellowship, we teach you how to build an irrationally loyal following of people (both within your company and greater network).
Learn more at mindmaven.com*
</aside>
This playbook is for executives who are curious about the role of an Engagement Manager, and how using a simple eDrafting system can save a meaningful amount of time, while enabling you to go from “good” to “great” in terms of delivering quality experiences to the people who matter most.
Welcome to Mindmaven’s eDrafting Playbook, where we provide a glimpse of our proven method that allows you to produce emails in a fraction of the typical time, while enabling you to deliver memorable, high quality experiences to the people who matter most.
Because people learn best in different ways, we present the information on this playbook in several forms - video, written summary, top quotes and key learnings.
Please let us know your thoughts - send us feedback with any comments, questions or areas where we can add clarity. Email [email protected].
eDrafting, or email drafting, is one of the most powerful concepts we have to offer you to gain and use leverage to do more and at the same time deliver great experiences.
One way to achieve this is to make sure you send a follow-up email to every qualified meeting you've had. Although the idea is entirely based on common sense, it is one of those strategies that often fall through the cracks because it is rarely urgent, only important.
To overcome this problem, you must reduce the execution burden to such an extent that you have no excuse under any circumstances for not sending a follow-up email.
We start every conversation with potential clients by asking what you wish you’d be doing less of, and what you wish you’d be doing more of.
In nearly every conversation, executives tell us one of the things they wish they spent less time on is writing emails.
Mindmaven can help you free up a ton of time spent writing emails by just changing your process a little bit.
The problem: Everyone appreciates receiving a follow-up email after a meeting. The reality is that most people don’t have the time to send follow-up emails anymore. And if they do send notes, the note is impersonal with just one or two lines: “Great seeing you. Talk soon.”
The insight: No one ever valued you for writing an email. They only value that you sent it. You can talk 4-5x faster than you can type–and you can talk wherever you are.
If you send a thoughtful email after every meeting, you differentiate yourself by creating something meaningful for the recipient.
Your EA can write the email. You just need to get the information to them.
The solution: We can set up a dictation solution on your phone that allows you to dictate the follow up email right after the meeting. The dictation gets sent to your EA through a task management system.
Your EA turns the dictation into an email that shows up in your email drafts.
If you had 10 meetings in a day, you would have 10 emails sitting there ready for you to send. All you have to do is review and click send. What would have taken you over 10 minutes per email is reduced to 1 minute.
We call this eDrafting. It’s just one of Mindmaven’s 87 playbooks and it can be applied to many different situations.
[**Patrick Ewers,** Founder and CEO of Mindmaven offers his perspective on working with an Engagement Manager to create powerful leverage and more effective relationship building.](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/5541cd2c-6dfe-4152-acea-5754eae78813/edrafting_playbook_2023.mp4)
**Patrick Ewers,** Founder and CEO of Mindmaven offers his perspective on working with an Engagement Manager to create powerful leverage and more effective relationship building.
“If you [typed out the email] yourself, you would be using 10 minutes of your own time per meeting. That can be reduced to about one minute. And that is an order of magnitude efficiency improvement that is extremely hard to find anywhere.”
"We’re missing great opportunities to deliver powerful experiences that can actually have a profound impact in the future."
“In almost every meeting you learn something; when you then share with that person what you've learned, you are building, in a very subliminal way, a powerful experience.”
<aside> 💡 Quick Summary: An Engagement Manager, or EM, is Mindmaven’s term for a hybrid between a “traditional” Executive Assistant and a Chief of Staff. An EM focuses on (a) providing the executive maximum leverage, and (b) helping the executive deliver positive, meaningful experiences to the people who matter most.
Business takes place in an urgency-driven world, where important-but-not-urgent items including providing good experiences are often crowded out by tasks with greater urgency, even if in the long run those urgent tasks are less important.
Mindmaven’s solution to ensure quality follow up emails involves simple, reliable technology that enables the executive to dictate anywhere they are, and the EM will receive the dictation and use it to produce a well written email that they place in the executive’s email drafts folder.
</aside>