Step Up Your Productivity Game: My Top 16 Tools for Running a High-Performing Agency in 2024

Hey everyone. I hope you're having a fantastic week. It's Rob DeCosta here, your host of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. And it's that time of year where I'm sharing with you my best tools and apps that have helped me run my business in an efficient and effective way. In the hope that they will inspire you, perhaps you'll learn about some new tools that will help you run your business more effectively as well. Now, together with this episode, I put together a handy PDF guide that you can download. So just make sure you go into the show notes and grab your free copy of that. But let's jump into today's episode which is my top 16 productivity tool recommendations for 2024. I'm Rob Da Costa and this is the Agency Accelerator Podcast. As someone who has stood in your shoes, having started, grown and sold my own agency, I know just how it feels in the ups and downs of agency life. So this podcast aims to ease your journey just a little by sharing mine and my guests experiences and advice as you navigate your way to growing a profitable, sustainable and enjoyable business. Can you believe we're coming to the end of the year? And that means the time when I share with you my favorite tools and apps of the year. Now I'll be giving you a rundown of each tool explaining the key benefits and how I use them in my business. And my goal is to provide you with some actionable recommendations to help you work smarter. So let's dive in. Now I'm going to categorize the tools together under a number of headings. So we're going to talk about AI tools, we're going to talk about podcast production, going to share with you my favorite all in one tools, talk about communication tools, video production, LinkedIn management, and finally planning and productivity. So let's kick things off in the most logical place and that's talking about AI. Because we cannot turn anywhere these days without being inundated with discussions around AI and AI tools. And indeed they have had a significant impact on my business. And you should definitely be using them in your agency as well because they will help you work more efficiently and more rapidly. And ultimately that means you're going to give your team members more capacity in their business as well. So let's jump into two AI tools that have been a super game changer for me. So obviously I can't talk about AI tools without talking about ChatGPT and indeed that was the first tool that I started using probably a year ago when I was first starting learning about AI. And it's been super useful for helping me research content and create drafts of podcasts and emails and so on. Now the key with any of the AI tools is you have to give it a really clear context. I tell the tool who you want them to be, tell them about your target audience and exactly what you want them to do. But then I discovered Claude AI and I found that Claude wrote in a more human like way. And also I was able to upload things like PDFs so I could say review this PDF and write in this style or add some more sections or whatever. So Claude maybe AI has become my go to tool now and I always use it as a research tool. And at the time the other big advantage of Claude that it was using more recent data up to 2023, whereas ChatGPT was only using data from 2021, although I believe that has changed now. So I use Claude for researching, for content creation, for outlining podcasts like this and a whole lot more. And it delivers me content much quicker than I would create it and it saves me a ton of time. Now I these tools as a way of getting from 0 to 50 really quickly and then you have to edit from 50 to 100, don't just copy and paste exactly what they come up with. And as I said earlier, make sure you're giving these tools a really clear context of who you want them to be, who your target audience is and exactly what you want them to write about and the style you want them to write in. So for example, I might say something like, you are an agency expert coach and you are going to write an email that's aimed at small to mid sized marketing agencies taking a pain agitate solve approach on a topic of blah blah, blah. Now if you give it that context, it's much more likely to write something that is more what you want them to write. And of course you might say write it in a conversational style or you might say use some examples or share my own experience to help it create that content for you. And anyway, as I say, I use this tool to get me from 0 to 50 and and then my editing time and writing time is from 51 to a hundred. So that is Claude AI. And obviously ChatGPT is in a similar vein and it can do the same types of things. So it's just a case of which one do you prefer. And of course there are other tools like Bard as well that I haven't really used. So those are the first two tools that fit under the AI category. Now there is A third tool that I use every single week, and that is a tool called Cast Magic and that helps me with my podcast creation. So let's move on to podcast production and I'll tell you more about Cast Magic Magic there. So, of course I recognize that everybody doesn't have their own podcast, so if you are ever thinking about creating one, then here's two tools that I find super useful. So, first of all, I use Zencaster for recording all my podcasts, especially with my guests. And the key reason for that is it does some post production magic, which means it sorts out recording levels and it also records locally. So if I'm interviewing someone in Australia, for example, it will record locally at their end and and record locally at my end, and then I upload it to my desktop. And that means that if there's a dodgy WI fi connection, I'm not going to lose quality because it's recording at both ends. Now, if I'm honest with you, I don't particularly like doing all the editing and the post production of my podcast. And castmagic came along last year as an AI tool to support this. Basically, you upload your video or your mp3 of your podcast, it does some analysis, it creates the transcription for you, and it also uses AI tools to come up with titles, to write social media posts, to write the timestamp, to create the show notes, and so on. Now, this is a tool in its development, so you still need to do quite a bit of editing, but it's similar to the other tools I was saying earlier. It gets you from 0 to 50% really quickly and then you just have to work on the 51 to 100% to get your podcast right. And it certainly makes life a lot easier. So that is my second podcasting tool, which is castmagic. So let's move on to the next category, which is all in one tools. And I am still a big, massive user of Kartra. And if you don't know Kartra, it is like Kajabi or one of those other platforms that basically handles most of my business. So it does all my email marketing with all the automation that you'd expect. I host my membership on the Kartra platform. I take all my payments through Kartra. It can host videos, I have calendars, and it had a few great new features this year. So one of them is that it has webinars embedded in it now. So that is going to save me some money, which means I don't need to renew my webinar. Jam or Ever Webinar licenses, which those two products have always made this list. And Webinar Jam is my live webinar platform and Ever Webinar is the on demand platform. So I won't be renewing those licenses next year when they come up for renewal, but instead we'll be hosting them through Kartra. Now, Kartra and Webinar Jam and everwebinar are kind of under the same parent umbrella. So the webinar functionality in Kartra doesn't look that different to WebinarJam. We will see when I start using it in earnest next year. Now, Kartra does an awful lot of things and it runs many aspects of my business, but it's also the most expensive tool, costing me over $2,000 a year to buy the platform. So unless you're looking for an all in one platform that can run much of your business and you're in the online world, then Kartra is probably not the right platform for you. But you'd be better off using the individual tools that will serve the purpose for what you need. And I'll come on to those shortly. Now, Searchie is another interesting tool that I have started using this year. I was part of Stu McLaren's the Membership Experience Group coaching program. And Stu's company is the producers of this new course hosting platform, I guess you would call it called Searchie. And what's really interesting about Searchie is you upload a video and it transcribes it and you can search that video based on the transcription. And when you've searched on a particular term, it will take you to that particular point in the video. And they also have some really interesting AI tools connected with searches. So I bought a license of that and I started hosting my videos on there for my membership program so that it gives my members a much more easy way to search through the video content. That is great. Now I could actually host my membership on Searchy, but I'm not willing to move away from Kartra and it's, it's a danger of being a shiny new object. So I'm sticking with Kartra, playing around with Searchie this year to see how it improves because it's fairly new tool, but it is interesting in terms of making videos much more searchable. Hence the product being called Searchy. So moving on to communication tools and for these I really rely on Zoom and Loom still. And of course we all probably pretty familiar with both of those. Zoom is a great tool that facilitates my Client coaching calls, my group coaching meetings for part of the self running agency. I also run my bi weekly agency accelerator live workshops on Zoom. And then I use Loom, that's L O O M which enables me to record quick videos to communicate with clients and it saves me a ton of time when they are asking for feedback and instead of writing a long email I can just open the document they want me to review and create a live video and then just send them my link. And of course it creates a lot more engagement as well. So of course there are other ways you can use Loom, such as part of your prospecting process, to send personalized videos to your audience. So not particularly exciting sexy tools, but Loom and Zoom are both really robust tools and interestingly enough both have introduced an AI element. So with Zoom you can can now get all the transcription from your calls, which is great. I use the paid version of Loom, but if I upgrade it even further then there's a whole set of AI tools that I could use that would also transcribe the videos and so on. So those are my two communication tools, Loom and Zoom, that I use. Moving on to the video production category, I'm still using Final Cut Pro to create all of my videos. It's a really sophisticated tool that is only a one off payment, so you're not paying for it monthly and you can do an awful lot. But it means I can produce vaguely decent, I hope you agree, quality videos on there. And I'm still using Canva for all of my design and my VA team are good at using that. So we can create all our social media graphics, our YouTube thumbnails and everything else using Canva. And again, I use a paid version of Canva. And again Canva has introduced quite a few AI elements into their product. Now I'm not quite sure how good they are yet. So you can type in text and it will supposedly create an image for you, but I'm not sure how good they are yet. But of course like many products, they're in their early days of development and no doubt will get a lot better. So those are my two key video production tools that I use. And let's move on to LinkedIn management now. Well, firstly, LinkedIn is a super important platform for any of us who are working in that B2B space. And unless you've got the time to spend every day researching your right audience and then creating some kind of outreach program to them, which you should be doing, you then want to look at using some automation. So Some people will agree with this and others won't, and that's perfectly fine. But I've used a number of tools over the years, including Duxoup, D U X Soup and Linked Helper. And these days I use Waalaxy. Wa A L A X Y. I seem to use tools with very strange names. But anyway, I use a tool called Waalaxy, which is very simple to use, which is why do it. So basically what you do is you do a search in LinkedIn, either in the free version or Sales Navigator. Sales Navigator will enable you to drill down your search much better. You create a list of a target audience, you import that list into Waalaxy, and then you set up an outreach campaign. Now, if you want these things to work, it's super important that you are building relationship with people and nurturing those relationships before you start to sell anything. So if you want LinkedIn outreach to work, then that is exactly what you need to do. And that's a topic for another podcast. But basically that's what I do. So it's basically like having an assistant sitting in the background reaching out to people every single day. And it's been a great way for me to add people into the top of my sales funnel, to invite them to my agency accelerator, live workshops, or to offer them a copy of my book and start building a relationship with people. So that is Waalaxy, which is a really great simple tool to use that. You basically import lists from LinkedIn and then you set up sequences which are either LinkedIn messaging or visiting profiles and all that kind of stuff, or also trying to find their email address and sending them an email. So that is Waalaxy. So let's move on to the last category, which is planning and productivity. And here are some of my favorite tools, including my remarkable Toby Asana, Ad Event and Ticktick. And the last two are new additions to this year's list. So let's start off with Toby, because this is a really great free Chrome extension where you can organize all of the tabs that you often use, or the websites that you want to visit, or Google Drives and so on. So that becomes your home screen. And that is a lifesaver for me because if you're like anything like me and fairly disorganized, then this helps you become organized. So that is Toby. It's a few free Chrome extension that has got better and better and better. And then probably my favorite tool still after several years of use, is my remarkable, which is my E Paper tablet. And as you know, this has enabled me to completely become paper free and keep all of my notes in one place on my Remarkable. And what I love about the Remarkable is that it gives you a very much writing on a paper experience and it only does that one thing. And it does it really, really well. And you store the information in in its cloud and that connects with your desktop Remarkable app as well. So you can easily transfer documents between the desktop and your Remarkable. And I absolutely love it and I use it every single day. And I haven't bought any paper for years and I haven't bought a printer cartridge either for years. So it just goes to show how important Remarkable has been for me. And by the way, I'll put links to all of the tools and apps that I've mentioned today in the show notes. So that's Toby and Remarkable. And then Asana is my project management tool of choice. And this is the tool that I use with my VA team and everybody else that works for me so that we can all stay on track of projects that we're working on. We're clear about deadlines, we're clear about who's responsible for what, and it just becomes a fantastic communication tool. Now, of course, there are lots of other tools like Monday or ClickUp or Basecamp that people use. It's just a case of finding a project management tool of choice that works for you. And Asana is our tool of choice. The other two tools I want to mention is I used to talk about Amazing Marvin as my to do list management. I've moved over to an app that was cheaper, to be honest, called Tick Tick. Another crazy name. But I guess the point is that you're ticking off tasks during your day. So I have this integrated to my Google Calendar and I make sure that I am allocating time every day to get the task done. And it syncs with the app on my phone and my computer and so on. So it's a great task list or to do list planner that becomes my bible. I have a whole bunch of reoccurring tasks, such as doing my zero reconciliation on a Monday morning. I have a team meeting on a Monday morning. So those are all set up as recurring meetings in Ticktick. And what's great is you can literally tick them off and you get a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. And then the last tool I wanted to mention is a a tool called Add Event. And Add Event basically enables people to instantly add an event into their diary, no matter where they host their diary, by just giving them a link that they click on and then choosing which calendar app they want to use, they can instantly put that appointment into their diary. I find this super useful for my group coaching program where we have twice monthly calls and I can just update the add event and the link is the same so they can instantly put the next appointment into their diary. So this just makes getting appointments into people's diaries are way easier. Okay, so there you have it. There's my top 16 tools for productivity and Efficiency. These are the tools that I'm using in my business, so I hope I've maybe introduced you to one or two new tools to go and look at. But do let me know if you've got any other recommendations that I should be trying. Because of course, software and systems are key to running our businesses and making us work smarter and boosting our output. So I hope these give some ideas on how you can improve your own workflow. Of course, if you've enjoyed this and you want to read more about them, then make sure you download the free guide that's associated with this week's podcast. And please do share that and the podcast with your friends. And as ever, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts if you enjoyed this episode and found it useful. But other than that, I hope you have a great rest of your week and I will see you next Thursday for the next episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. It.