Can we skip to the good part?
In this blog post, ’10 Essential Tools: Guaranteed to scale your business’. We will be covering:
01. CRM for start-ups: Hello Bonsai
02. CRM for established businesses: Dubsado
03. Email marketing & Checkouts: Flodesk
04. Social Media Scheduling: Facebook Business Suite
05. Social Media Scheduling: Later
09. Business Streamlining: Google
Click on any of the above links to direct you to the exact section you’re looking for!
It’s been a few years since I started running my own business, and to say I’ve learned a few lessons along the way would be an understatement.
Of course, each business is unique, and we all go through our own journey – but one thing I know we can all agree on is that we all would LOVE to save time and be successful right from the get-go! Those first few years of spending hours figuring out the right systems, understanding how to keep track of all your finances, yawn – can we skip to the good part already.
Well, I’m here to help you through it..
I’m a firm believer that sharing is caring, so I’ve put together a list of my TOP 8 ‘MUST HAVE’ tools to streamline your business. I can’t guarantee you won’t still have a rocky first year of business, full of many, many life lessons, but I can guarantee that if you use these tools, it will save you a whole lot of time, money & stress!
So, grab a cuppa and a notepad and enjoy the fact that I have done all the hard work for you!
MY TOP 10 MUST HAVE BUSINESS TOOLS:
01. CRM for start-ups: Hello Bonsai
Hello Bonsai will always hold a place in my heart! It was my first ever business management software, and it organised and automated everything for me so effortlessly! From my personal experience with Hello Bonsai, I would say it’s perfect for younger service based businesses in need of a good invoicing system, contracts and forms. It’s also great for lead captures, and sending professional client proposals. It’s very stripped back, but all you really need when you’re starting out.
Who enjoys drawing up contracts, invoices & proposals? I think we can all agree that it’s nobodies first choice of task. However, contracts are one of the most important things in a ‘service based’ business. As frustrating as it can be, it is super important to keep on top of the legal side of things, and Hello Bonsai does exactly that.
Hello Bonsai helps you to streamline the process of onboarding new clients. It handles contracts, invoices, proposals, expenses, time tracking – the list goes on! It even has templates all ready to use, making setup really quick and easy! Streamlining your client onboarding process not only makes life a LOT easier for you, but it also gives off a slick, professional appearance to any new clients. Thank me later!
Click here if you would like to get started with Hello Bonsai, and get x2 weeks free on me!
02. CRM for established businesses: Dubsado
Now, Dubsado is also a business management software. As much as I loved Hello Bonsai, as my business grew, it wasn’t quite fit for my needs anymore. I needed a system that did all of the above, but one that I could completely customise to my business needs.
Dubsado was perfect for this! So this is what eventually replaced Hello Bonsai.
My favourite part of Dubsado is the GORGEOUS proposal forms you can create. You can completely customise it to your own branding and wow your prospects into clients, from the get go. There’s so much that can be done with the proposal forms. You can create multiple packages, add-ons, forms and so on.
Another amazing feature is creating your own tailored client flows, automations, e-mailing (which can be linked to your direct mailing inbox), client portals, as well as bespoke styles of invoicing that suits your business needs. You can completely customise your forms too – which is great for creating unique systems that saves time within your business (and saves the constant messy back-and-forth via e-mails!)
This software, is honestly perfect for any service based business that has reached a point where they need a more tailored, higher-end experience for their clients as well as more automation features for their CRM (Customer Relationship Management).
With a programme that is automated, runs itself, and looks beautiful at the same time – will be the key to scaling your business.
Click here if you would like to get started with Dubsado, and get 20% off your first month, or year!
03. Email marketing & Checkouts: Flodesk
Email marketing. It’s a key part of growing an online business. But unfortunately, when you’ve got an endless to-do list, any form of marketing slips to the bottom of the pile.
Flodesk is a brilliant emailing marketing tool which helps you to create beautiful emailers in half the time. With a huge database of templates, you don’t even need to spend time designing your emails from scratch.
One of my favourite things about Flodesk is that you can even set up a customer journey, meaning that your audience can receive a sequence of emails – without you having to lift a finger. Let’s say you have an event coming up, you can set up Flodesk to not just send out the first invite – but set up enticing reminders as the date gets closer. Once it’s set up, Flodesk does the rest, so you don’t have to struggle trying to remember to send an email to everyone!
Flodesk have also really upped their game lately, and introduced a Checkout feature. Which is perfect for businesses that sell anything from digital products, all the way through to service based sessions such as therapy, business consultancy, photography and so on!
Having consistent and automated e-mail marketing, is the perfect way to raise your profile, authority and scale your business.
Click here if you would like to get started with Flodesk, 50% Off (for life)!
04. Social Media Scheduling: Facebook Business Suite
Social media… it’s a love hate relationship for most of us!
Being active on social media is SO important in growing a business, but it can feel like the biggest drag when you sit down every day to update your socials. Facebook Business Suite helps you to get your social media organised, by allowing you to bulk plan your content in advance, scheduling posts for the future.
Trust me, you’ll feel so much more relaxed knowing that you can spend just a couple of hours a month creating your content then sit back knowing your posts are being uploaded automatically. I love social media as much as the next girl but spending time manually updating posts everyday isn’t fun for anyone!
It’s great for scheduling your posts to both Facebook and Instagram. The best part. It’s completely free to use!
Just log into your Facebook and you’ll find it under settings. (this will work only if you have created a business page within Facebook)
05. Social Media Scheduling: Later
If you’re someone that is on more platforms than just Instagram and Facebook alone. For example, Linkedin, TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter and so on. Then Later will be perfect for you.
It’s great for being able to push all of your content to multiple platforms, which saves you so much time! It is a paid platform, but it’s worth every penny! We choose to use this for managing all of our clients social media, as well as our own. It’s great for managing multiple accounts all at once.
Another bonus to using Later, is you can set it to automatically send you analytics at a time of the month that suits you best, so you can keep on top of what’s working best, and what’s not doing so well. Ensuring that you maintain a high-standard of engaging content that your audience genuinely loves. Getting Later as part of your essentials kit is a no brainer.
Click here to get started and choose a package that works for you!
06. Website Platform: Showit
Websites should be totally individual to each person and business. Capturing a business’s ethics and personality, as well as trying to target your ideal customer!
Building your dream website can feel like an impossible task that only the professionals can do and if you’re a start-up, you might be hoping to spend this money elsewhere in growing your business. Well, let me introduce you to an old friend of mine – showit! Showit makes doing it yourself possible and simple! Not a line of ‘code’ in sight. Simply drag and drop images and text and customise it exactly how you want!
Click here to get a FREE month on showit, on me!
We’ve even gone one step firther, and created our own unique range of Showit templates to choose from. You can take a look via our shop!
07. Screen Recording: Loom
Have you got new team members that require virtual training? Or maybe your clients could benefit from some step-by-step ‘how to’ videos. Loom is a screen recording and interactive video app which can be used for educational purposes. My team of virtual assistant’s love using loom to help clients understand how to use specific software or programmes. Just send a quick screen recording showing them exactly what to do, it’s as easy as that! Loom is brilliant for lectures, presentations or tutorials because you can record your screen at the same time as recording yourself on the front camera.
Click here to try Loom out for yourself!
08. Client Management: Slack
Communication is key – especially when it comes to business! But endless phone calls can eat away at the precious hours in your day. Slack allows you to successfully stay connected with others inside and outside of your business. You can chat, send files, have video meetings or even send voice notes. It’s a great messenger app that keeps people connected and makes it easy to share the information that they need, when they need it! When I first started using slack, I got a little too excited about how similar it is to MSN – if you know you know.
It’s a great tool but be mindful of your time, it can be easy to think your being productive when you’re really just sending out instant messages all day – oops!
Click here to get started with Slack!
09. Business Streamlining: Google
Feeling unorganised or overwhelmed? Google have really made it easy for businesses to stay organised, especially if you have an internal team that need to share documents / timetables etc. Take some time to checkout Googles huge host of free tools to help you with your business!
Google Meets – video conferencing which allows up to 500 internal or external participants and live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers.
Create an account here – Google Meet (formerly Hangouts Meet) Pricing
Google Docs – collaboration between team members – edit documents virtually in real time with other members of your team. Tag people to receive input, receive suggestions or answer questions. Seamlessly works with other google apps, such as Google meets, Google Drive, Gmail, Google sheets.
Download here – Google Docs – create and edit documents online, for free.
Google Drive – safely store documents and photos in a cloud, freeing up space on your devices. These documents can be easily accessed by anyone in your team that needs to view them.
Download here – Download – Google Drive
10. Organisation: Notion
Then we have my ABSOLUTE favourite, the best till’ last! Honestly, this one has changed my life… and anyone that knows me well, know’s I am obsessed.
We all have things that need to get done, don’t we? To-Do lists can feel never ending! Notion provides a task management system that is completely tailored to your needs and works the way you design it to! No business owner wants to be governed by someone else’s way of doing things, so Notion is completely customisable to fit your needs and works the way you do!
Simply manage your tasks and projects straight from Notion. Keep track of all your projects, tasks, and sort them easily by today, upcoming, and other filters. It really is the task system that does it all – I can’t recommend it enough and I use it to manage my whole team.
- *It’s super handy if you manage a team of people or have external or virtual assistants!
Try it for free – Notion – One workspace. Every team.
So there you have it, some fabulous tools to help your business to streamline and grow – tried, tested and loved by me!
Feeling empowered? Great! Take some time to look through these tools and start implementing them within your business, I promise that you’ll thank yourself in the long run for doing it now!
Still feeling overwhelmed? Sometimes we need a bit of help to get the ball rolling so please get in contact with us, we would be happy to assist you in making these first steps!
Struggling to find the time to start implementing all of these tools? Get in contact – we have a brilliant team of virtual assistants that can assist you in lightening your workload, freeing up your valuable time.
