No Employees? These Tools Replace a Whole Team

strategies are in this book. I don't have any employees. I have no intention of ever having employees. So I find tools to do, to make my life easier and put them into several categories. So the first one is a client relationship manager, a CRM. I'm sure you've heard that term before. It is basically No, for me it's my business in a box. Everything I need is in that CRM. In fact, all of the tool categories that I'm gonna talk about today, I have in one tool, which is my CRM. But that is not the way it used to be. I used to have a whole bunch of like one thing in each one of these categories. And so I know the struggle. You've got tons of tools, tons of fees, and it all adds up. It's still cheaper than having an employee, but it is, it all adds up, which is why I went with my CRM, which currently is GoHighLevel. I will be honest, I am now a GoHighLevel agency, but I use this tool for almost 5 years. Before I ever became an agency or an affiliate or resold it or anything. In fact, I've been using it for 5 years. Now I'm in my 6th year, and what this tool will do is a ton, but you don't have to use all the features. And in the beginning, I didn't. All I used was what I really needed at that point for my business, not realizing that some of the other things in there I really did need for my business. I just didn't understand. So CRM, big category. Again, I use GoHighLevel. I have used Keap or Infusionsoft in the past. Personally didn't like it. It was too confusing for me. It wasn't how my brain worked. I have clients that use things like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, AWeber, all of those, those really are more email management software or software newsletters, uh, distribution, that type of a thing, as opposed to a full-blown CRM, at least from what I have seen with those. There's another popular one out there called Zoho. When I was looking to figure out going from Infusionsoft to something I looked at Zoho. It was a little confusing for me because everything is sold independently and then you gotta figure out which pieces you need. I just wanted simple. So I went with GoHighLevel. It does everything I need it to do. The next one category is a social media scheduler. So unless you wanna spend a ton of time on social media, which personally I do not, I highly suggest you get a scheduler. There's everything from the traditional Buffer, Hootsuite kind of tools. And all of these connect up to your social media. So you go to one place, you basically have a social media dashboard if you wanna look at it that way. Canva, if you have a, a Pro Canva account, it will connect to your social media. It's great to use things you already have, especially if you're paying for them. Instead of bringing on a new tool. But a social media scheduler is a must. For me, I do it through GoHighLevel, so I have one fee. The next category is image tools, ways that you can create images easily. I used to be a big Photoshop user because I have I am a hobby photographer and I've had Photoshop forever. I— it has a huge learning curve, which I learned in the beginning, at least for the pieces that I need for, for what I do with it. And then Canva came on the market and you know what? Canva, it took me a while to adopt, but Canva is way easier to learn. Than Photoshop. So I recommend Canva to everybody. They have a free version and they have a paid version. The free version has a lot less access to stock images, but if it gets you what you need, get the free version. Uh, it's a fantastic tool for taking an image, putting your logo on it, putting some text on it, and then having it either to use on your website, on, in your social media, however you wanna use that image. Some other image tools that have come on the market in the last few years that I use: Midjourney. I was an early adopter for Midjourney. It's a fantastic AI tool, but it does have a learning curve. I will be honest with you on that one. ChatGPT has an image tool built in. I don't like it so much. I could just be too picky. I don't know. I don't like it. I never get anything I use out of it, so I quit even trying. Another good one that has recently became a good one is the tool in Gemini, which is Nano Banana. That tool, a couple months ago, had a wonderful update, and it is a way more realistic tool than it used to be, and it's way easier to use than Midjourney as far as AI tools go. For images. I would suggest it. Gemini is free, that tool is free, especially if you have a Workspace account that you're already paying for. It's all included in there, so might as well use what you're already paying for. Heard that one before. The next one are planning tools. These are really good if you need to get yourself organized, or if you have a VA or somebody you're working with that needs to know like where you're at, where they're at, and you can talk to each other sort of through these tools. I use Notion. I, I, I love it. I think it's easy to use. There are some other tools out there, like Trello is one that I tried. It's one of those, I believe they call 'em Kanban tools where you can take a tile and move it. In different places kind of a thing. So that's, that's the two that I've used. Review management tools. This is basically a tool to help you ask for reviews. I do it all within GoHighLevel. I have a pipeline set up in GoHighLevel to where the very last step of build my building website pipeline. Is I move it in there. That's when they've launched, everything is done, and then it automatically kicks off an automation that I have built out to ask for review. And in that automation, there's emails that go out, and in the emails, there's different places that people can leave me reviews online. And I put them— the email goes something like this. Um, if, if you love the experience that you had with building your website, please consider leaving me a review. Here are some places online you can do that, and I place them in the order that I want them to do it. The very first one is Google. You get far more reviews or far more mileage on your reviews from Google. Uh, and a lot of the other directories online actually pull from your Google reviews and place them elsewhere, which I think is super cool. And I link directly to where they go to leave a review. Do not make them hunt and peck on the internet to try to find it. It won't happen. Direct links in this email. The next one is, uh, I believe Trustpilot is on there. There's one more on there. Uh, and then the bottom, I say, if you wanna leave me a review, but you don't wanna do it online, go ahead and reply to this email and I will put it on my website. So that's how I handle reviews. In the bottom of that email, I give them suggestions because a lot of people are like, I don't know what to say. And they get stuck and they either leave something really lame like, oh, it was great working with them. Okay, that's nothing. So, so leave them some like thinking points. And I think some of my thinking points are, why did you decide to use us? What was the experience like during your website build? There's like 5 or 6 different like thinking points that I put in there that helps people think about what they're going to write in their review. I'm not writing it for them. I'm giving them thinking points. The other thing about review software is that it makes it easy to respond to reviews as well. And there are some actual review platforms out there where you can sign up for them. They will send out these automated emails for you and they will follow up for you and then they will respond for you. I personally just do it through GoHighLevel. I have an automation set up and they have a way in GoHighLevel that you can now use AI to automatically respond. I personally don't use that. Uh, I have a custom GPT I wrote for that, and I just use that and cut and paste and respond. Um, but responding is important for every review. Video editing software is another tool that you will likely need if you're going to be using video. Video editing software is all over the board. There's tons of it out there. I started with Camtasia. I then went to, um, Well, I don't remember what I went to. Then I went to Descript, great AI video editing tool. I like Descript because instead of having to listen and then find where you want to cut or edit, mark your timeline and then listen and find the end and then cut that piece out, that takes way too much time. Descript will transcribe your video for you when you upload it, and then you can read on the side exactly what you said in the video and if there's something you don't like, you highlight the words and you delete. It deletes it from the transcript and the video. So you're basically reading to edit the video, which is so much faster, at least for me. Um, so I love Descript. Uh, recently I'm using Riverside, which is what this is streaming through. It is a streaming platform, somewhat like StreamYard or Restream. The reason I went with Riverside, because they one had an awesome Black Friday deal, but they automatically make shorts and they automatically do a lot of repurposing stuff within there, which makes my life easier. And tools that make your life easier is what you are looking for. Time tracking tools. This might be something that would be of interest to you, especially if you are hiring somebody to do a certain job and you want to know exactly how how much time they're using, have a time tracking tool available for them to use if they don't have one. And you can track your time so that you can see exactly how much time you spend on things. And that way you can better plan and manage your day with knowing exact numbers instead of just thinking, oh, I probably spend 15 minutes doing this, 30 minutes doing that. And the reality is it's more like 30 minutes on the first and an hour on the second. And then you get done with your day and you're like, okay, I, didn't get as much done as I wanted. I don't feel like I've accomplished anything. To get over that, time tracking. One thing you can do, this is free. So instead of getting an actual paying for a time tracking tool, do a time audit, um, like once a quarter for a week on yourself and just use an Excel spreadsheet, put in the, um, times going across and going down, you can put in what you do, and then you can see exactly where you're spending your time. And when I do it, it's like 30-minute increments. I know people that do it in 15-minute increments, but for my brain, that's just a little bit too much. So I do 30-minute increments, write down exactly what I do in every 30-minute block, and then I take that, I give it to ChatGPT, and I say, Chat, Where can I be more efficient? What do I need to delegate? What do I need to cut out so that my day is more useful to me? So time editing or time auditing is a very useful thing to do. And the last one is scheduling tools. And this is not social media scheduling. This is your calendar scheduling. So I've, um, I again use GoHighLevel. It's all in there for that. It integrates with my Google Calendar and people can schedule when it's, when they're on my website scheduling an appointment, they can see exactly when I'm available because if they're on that calendar trying to schedule and I'm not available, it's not available for them to schedule. So there's, it's time blocked out. You want to look at it that way. But it doesn't say anything about what I'm doing. There's no, you know, no HIPAA violations, even though I'm not a HIPAA company for that. There's another company that I know a lot of people use, which is Calendly. I believe that's a paid tool. And then there's one called TidyCal or something close to that, that I have some customers that use. So those scheduling tools really made my life easy. I've been using them now for probably 6 or 7 years. And prior to that, scheduling an appointment was back and forth in email or jumping on a phone call back and forth, trying to figure out when, when's a good time for everybody. It just, it took all of that out. It saves a ton of time. Most of them, if not all of them, you can set up automated reminders that go out either through text or email. So you're not having to remember to remind people about their appointments and hopefully you're not missing appointments or they're not missing appointments. My missed appointment rate went down tremendously when I started using a scheduling tool. That had the auto reminders in there. It's fabulous. So that is the list of tools and the categories that you will need. Go ahead and leave in the comments if you have other tools that you really love, because I like sharing tools and other people like to know what works for other people. So that completes our 15 Chapters to Marketing Made Easy. I hope you enjoyed this series and I will see you around the internet.