Airtable From The Ground Up (For Consultants)

Are you a business consultant just getting started with Airtable? Then this guide is for you. In this 15-minute read, I'll walk you through the basics to make sure you set yourself and your remote team up for success.

Let's jump in!

Step 1: Map Out What Your Team Needs

It's tempting to think that the first thing you need to do is set up an Airtable account, but mapping out exactly what your team wants to get out of the platform is actually where you must start.

So, take out a piece of paper (physical or virtual) and jot down everything that you want to build in Airtable. If you're not sure yet what you want to build, think about it in terms of:

• what departments or team groups you'll need (e.g., marketing, sales, client fulfillment)
• what projects you'll start working on (e.g., a marketing campaign)
• who needs access to what (e.g., clients need access to a folder to see the status of documents and consulting projects; marketing team members need access to the marketing section but shouldn't have access to finance; etc.)

From here, you can then create a simple diagram that puts all this information together into an organized blueprint—this is what you'll use as your basis for setting up your Airtable.

Here's an example for a very new and small consulting firm:

Taking the time to map out what you need first will save you a lot more time later on and will help you avoid the unnecessary clutter and confusion that comes with randomly building bases and projects.

Step 2: Set Up Your Base(s)

Now comes the exciting bit. It's time to fire up Airtable and create your first base!

Start by creating an account. Then, follow the walkthrough to create your first base. Airtable will give you the basic tour (which you might find helpful), and you might end up with something like this:

This is where having the general layout mapped out comes in handy, because you can translate your blueprint into Airtable structures.

For general reference, here's the hierarchy: a workspace contains bases that each contain tables that each contain fields. So the workspace is the largest structure you can have in Airtable, and it's usually good enough to represent your entire firm unless you're massive and need an entire workspace just for a department.

You can have multiple bases within a workspace to represent smaller, but still large collections of information and tasks. If you choose to make a workspace your firm, then each base would be a department.

Within each base, you can build multiple tables. These are like subfolders within folders—the folders being your bases. They can help you group together related tasks that belong to the same project.

Lastly, within each table, you have fields—these are the basic data units, which are usually tasks.

Let's follow our ABC Consulting Firm example to see how you can translate your diagram into Airtable structures:

• ABC Consulting Firm is contained in 1 workspace.
• The firm is small but growing quickly, so it's worthwhile to set up separate bases for each department early on. That means the firm will have a separate base for:Marketing & SalesProject ManagementFinance & AccountingClients
• Within each base, the team needs several different groupings.For Marketing & Sales, the firm will set up 3 tables: a Lead Tracker database for the sales team; a Q4 2024 Campaign table and a Q1 2025 Campaign table for the marketing team.For Project Management, the firm will start by setting up a single table for Team Tracking.For Finance & Accounting, the firm can set up two tables: one for Clients and one for Suppliers. (To categorize each transaction depending on the subcategories, they can assign tags—more on that in a bit.)For Clients, the firm can set up the base in different ways; the most straightforward way is to create 3 tables, one for Ava, one for Barry, and one for Charlie.

Then, any tasks that need to be completed within each grouping can be added as a field or record inside the relevant table.

Here's a screenshot of what the workspace overview would look like:

And what the Marketing & Sales base, for example, would look like:

Quick note, you might find that your diagram doesn't translate directly or neatly into an Airtable structure. That's perfectly fine and normal.

You may need to get creative to find efficient ways to group together your information and link tables to get the job done, which may require more complex Airtable structures.

If you feel like you and your team need something above the basics and want to have an expert guide you and set everything up properly for you, send me a DM or leave me a comment; I'm your guy ??

Step 3: Invite Your Team Members and Set Permissions

Once you have your base set up, it's time to invite your team to join in on the fun!

When you're setting up a base, you'll usually be prompted to invite your team. In this case, you can just type in their emails and voilà. If you want to invite team members after the fact, just click on the share icon and invite by email.

At this point, I'd like to mention permissions. When you invite someone by email, you can choose to make them...

• Creator (can fully edit the base)
• Editor (can't configure fields or tables, but can edit records and views)
• Commenter (can add comments and create views for themselves, but can't actually edit anything)
• Read only (can view everything, but can't comment or create views)

Depending on your needs, you may wish to choose a specific permission. For instance, ABC Consulting Firm will want team members in charge of marketing to have Creator or at least Editor permissions in the Marketing & Sales base, but may restrict project management team members to Commenter or Read only in the Marketing & Sales base.

When you invite someone, you also have several other options you can mix and match with:

• Invite to the workspace—by default, if you invite someone by email to a base, you're only inviting them to that base. To invite them to the entire workspace, tick this box.

• Sending a link instead of an email invite—you can create a link that allows anyone (or anyone who has a certain email address) to join at a permission you set.

• Enabling public sharing—this is a view-only option that's great if you also want to share a base with a client or someone outside the organization. Keep in mind though that anyone with the link can access, so the link should be safely guarded and the base shouldn't contain any sensitive information.

Step 4: Integrate Relevant Apps

Does your team currently use other apps to communicate with each other, with clients, or manage certain aspects of work? You can significantly reduce back-and-forth between apps by integrating the apps with Airtable.

For example, suppose your team likes to communicate through Slack. You can use the built-in Slack-Airtable integration to receive reminders and notifications in Slack whenever an action is completed in Airtable. To do this for a base, just click on the dropdown next to the name of the base, then click the 3 dots, then click on Slack notifications and follow the steps from there.

Not all apps can be integrated so quickly and seamlessly. And if you want to receive Slack messages in Airtable, you'll need something more advanced. That's where automation (and automation experts) come in.

Step 5: Set Up Automations

Automations can make work flow much faster. For example, if you want to import client emails into an Airtable base, you can set up an integration between Airtable and Gmail and then an automation to pull content from new emails as they come, allowing you to have every email in a central location without having to put in any manual effort.

You can create a new automation by going to the Automations tab. Automations range from simple things like having Airtable send you an email every time a task is done, to complex things like updating across a range of tables and apps.

Here's an example of how you would set up the simple automation mentioned, in case you feel like an email notification when a task is complete would be helpful. We'll imagine we're building it for ABC Consulting:

1) Add a trigger. This is what causes the automation to turn on. In this case, we'll choose "When a record matches conditions."

2) Choose the table (if you have multiple) and set the conditions. In this case, we'll choose the Q4 campaign, and we want the Status to be "Done" before an email is sent. (Pro tip: Test the trigger to make sure it's working properly ?? )

3) Add an action. The action in this case is to have Airtable send an email when a task is completed. There are some fields to fill out to configure the email action, which you can do as most fits your needs.

Lastly, test the automation, and if everything works as expected, turn it on.

Your team may require more advanced automations for business to run smoothly. If that's the case, you don't have to spend endless hours learning advanced Airtable techniques, integration apps, and maybe even code.

If you have an expert by your side , you can turn your Airtable dreams into reality without the stress and hassle of new tech. Want to learn more about how I can help you? DM me now.

You're Ready!

If you successfully completed all the steps above, you'll have the basics of Airtable covered and you'll be ready to get good work done on it.

Let me know if you have any questions, or if you would like my assistance with a more advanced set-up.

To your success,

Luke.

P.S. Check out Boom Automations for fast, done-for-you system integrations and automation.