The top three tools I use to run my business
Running a business can be hard and some days I would do anything to make my work life easier!
It has taken me a couple of years to fine tune my business processes (is anything ever perfect?) but I feel like I’m now at the stage where I can share my top three recommendations with you to help streamline your business. Obviously, I use many more tools to run my business but these are my top three cannot live without tools. If you would like to know which other tools I use, or you are struggling to setup process for your own business, feel free to get in touch.
Dropbox is a cloud system where I can save my work instantly or back up files at the end of the day/week (depends how comfortable you are with having work not backed up eek) I work directly to my Dropbox account and work is backed up every few minutes, which is great for piece of mind!
Working this way means that I don’t have any client work stored on my laptop (incase the worst ever happened) and I also don’t have to worry about running out of digital space or saving to an external hard drive. Dropbox is a great tool especially if your’e a designer or photographer creating large files that need storing in the ‘cloud’ and you also need to sync files with multiple devices, share or collaborate with clients and suppliers. Once I’ve completed a project I can easily archive the files knowing that they are safe, if and when I need to access them again I can quickly navigate to the relevant folder.
Alternatives to check out are Google Drive, OneDrive, Icedrive, Box.
As I spend more and more time creating content to promote my business online, I use Planoly to schedule and manage this process for me. If your mind works visually like mine you will love the ability to move posts around to create an aesthetically pleasing grid layout to match your brand look. Planoly takes all of the stress out of planning my socials posts and I can schedule posts to go live on Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook all at the same time without any of the worry or extra work normally involved. It also has a hashtag section where I can save my hashtags into groups ready to use on future posts, which saves time writing and remembering the ones that were successful on previous posts.
Alternatives to check out are Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Tailwind, Later.
Trello is a web-based, Kanban-style, list-making tool that I use to organise my day to day work load. I can collaborate and manage client projects with ease using specific boards for each client project. Clients know which stage of the process we are at and what to expect next and when because it’s arranged within their bespoke project board. When I’m out of the office and I don’t have a pen or paper to hand I jot down my ideas into the Trello app on my phone, it’s a great way to quickly store my ideas before I forget!
Alternatives to check out are Monday, Notion, Asana.
Thanks for reading, if you found this blog post useful please share. ～ Mechele
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