Free HubSpot Tools to Power-up Your Small Business with Andrew Parkes

Hey, community, it's your boy, George B. Thomas. And we're here with another Hub Ed Helper interview where we're going to talk about this very interesting topic to me and I think to you because, well, you're tuned in and that is free HubSpot tools to amp up your small business in 2022, by the way, and beyond. And be on. I'm telling you, 22 is just the start of some good stuff that's coming down the road for you as a community member. But, but I'm also excited because today I have a guest that's gonna help us walk through this and that is Andrew Parks. Andrew is here. And Andrew, why don't we just start out with a little bit of who you are, what you do and kind of where you do it.

Yeah, thanks, George. I'm really excited to be with you today. I, I run a business called Small Business Systems Professionals. How I started this was right now in my day job, I work with Fortune 500 companies as an efficiency consultant. What I'm primarily trying to help them do is, is get out of their email and get less meetings because everyone's over emailed, everyone's over meeting to death. And we try to help them put in better systems into their businesses, including one of the best systems around called HubSpot. That, that you're aware of. Small Business Systems Professionals is I'm taking everything I've learned working with these Fortune 500 teams and I've distilled it down and geared it more to the small business owner because usually they have a smaller team, a lower budget, and they're kind of doing, you know, their jack of all trades in their business. And what I've really tried to do is say, how can I take what I've learned working with for Fortune 5000 and distill it down to the, to the small business owner that's trying to find better systems in their business.

I love that. I feel like, Andrew, maybe you're like hanging out in my office or you bugged my office because emails and meetings, I swear, and I know viewers, you're probably the same way. Like, yes, more emails and meetings, please. No said no one said no one ever. Here's the thing. I do want to just kind of start with an overarching type question here to get us to start to, you know, wade into the pool of this idea of HubSpot free tools to amp up your business. And so Andrew, in your mindset, why do you feel like it's important for small businesses to leverage these HubSpot free tools.

Yeah, I would say a small business owner, like I said, is a jack of all trades. And really their major constraint is their time, right? So anytime we can find a way to save them time in running their business, that's where we want, that's where we want to help them, is finding time and saving time. And one thing is that, you know, most small business owners are not systems or software experts, right? They're probably really good at coaching or they're really good, you know, running consulting business, but they're, you know, systems. And that piece is not their, you know, bread and butter. You know, something like HubSpot, really, especially the free stuff that HubSpot offers, helps them save time, but also integrates everything together into one place to look. They don't have to look at their website, their database, their email, their scheduler. They don't have to look in all those different places. With a lot of the free tools that HubSpot offers, they can consolidate down so that they're really only looking at, you know, one or two places to find information about prospects and customers. And so really, at the end of the day, it's about saving them time and, and helping them find the information faster.

So good. So good. I mean, listen, if you save us time, we can golf more or whatever, whatever that thing is that we love, right? We can spend more time doing that, less of what may be bogging us down. So here's the thing. I know I want to talk about multiple tools that, that these businesses can put in their tool belt to amp up their business in 2022 and beyond, but I want to start with like, does Andrew have a favor? Right? So the question literally is, what is your favorite number one free tool out of them all and why is that the tool?

The number one favorite tool for me is the email integration that HubSpot offers. Now here, what I mentioned earlier, when things are disconnected, it's so difficult, it wastes so much time because I'm going from one thing to the other, right? If you think about it, if I'm a small business owner, I'm probably spending a lot of time in email because I need to communicate with prospects and clients and things of that nature. HubSpot offers a really nice time saving, deeply integrated integration into email. So from my email, not only can I see all of my prospect or customer information in the sidebar, but I can log the email, I can track the email, I can, I can enter in an email template, I can put in my meeting links, documents, snippets. My email almost becomes like my control center for my business. And so I'm trying to get small business owners to spend less time in email. But imagine if you can, if you have to be responsive obviously because your customers and your prospects are talking to an email. But imagine if you can integrate your CRM and have everything at your fingertips within within email and connect it to your whole business. I think it's a massive important feature.

Yeah, I love that this is the one you brought up because I've also historically talked about this feature as look, it doesn't mean I have to go into my CRM. The CRM literally becomes in your email meaning you'll see that sidebar, you'll see those templates and snippets and documents that you just talked about. Andrew. And so this like age old if I gotta go here, I gotta go there to communicate. No just communicate like that's it. It's both places is so magical. So here's the thing though. I know there's gotta be a couple runners up as far as tools that business owners could be using. So what are the quick like right after this, you know email for Gmail or Outlook or whatever email you're using this integration. What are the quick two to three follow up tools every business, every business owner or employee needs to think about implementing today?

Yep, great question George. That right out of the box the two right, right. With the free version of HubSpot the two big ones are forms connected to data properties which, which solves a huge problem with most small businesses in that they might be using like a Google form or a type form which is great to, for forms but where does that data go? You know it, it sits somewhere in a spreadsheet or in you know in a type form database and it's, it's not usable by the small business owner. So having forms that they can connect to properties that, that they could connect to the contacts within their, within HubSpot really helps them to, to have a bigger, a better picture of what's happening with their prospects at and at the, at their fingertips they can see everything that the, that the prospect or client has submitted from the, from the form. It's just so much easier to make decisions and to, to digest information. So forms connected to properties is the big one and then second one is the scheduler. You know most if you look around a lot of people use calendly to you know if I need to book time with George instead of going back and forth 40 times via email, George will Send me a scheduler. I'll, I'll pick a, pick a time that's convenient. HubSpot has that free built in and connect directly connected to my Google or Outlook calendar. And I can set that up so that I can make sure that I give my prospects and customers time to meet with me. And I can, you know, I can essentially block my calendar so that we're, we're only meeting at times that make sense for, for each of us. Right. So I save a ton of time in the scheduling process, avoid the back and forth again, I save, you know, save that time and, and people can meet with me and we can, you know, and all that data goes right into my HubSpot database.

Yeah, Andrew, I think we're brothers from another mother, to be honest with you, because meetings is probably within the top three list for me as well. The ability to have individual meetings, round robin meetings, group meetings, and the tight integration of like, nope, the there's already meeting during that time or the fact that I can set those. I only want to do this type of meetings from like 12 to 4 and that's it on Wednesday and Friday. Like just the granularity and the user experience of getting rid of that volleyball. I'm free at 4. Well, what about 3? Did I say 3? I said 4. Well, how about Tuesday at 2 and you're like, oh my, you want to pull your hair out. And so I love that you brought up HubSpot meetings. So here's the thing. Business. Let's just be honest, Andrew, business is hard. Like it can be hard and different portions of business can be hard. And so I'm super curious what your brain will unpack on this next question because I always love to go over the challenges or what I like to call the hurdles. And so what hurdles have you seen small businesses face? And how does HubSpot help battle these with their free tools?

Yeah, I think that the big one, George, is even as a solopreneur or as a small business owner, you need to think about growing, growing your company and growing your team and asking for help, especially in areas that aren't in your unique ability or gifting. So really, at the end of the day, if you're a small business of 1 or a 5 or of 10, you have to think about what is it going to be like to add our next team member or to, you know, to grow to our next, you know, tier of revenue. And one thing I've noticed with small business owners is that a lot of the knowledge of, in their Companies is in their heads of either the owner or the, the team, the small team that they, they run. So I'm all about documentation. I really want to get stuff out of people's heads and into tools like HubSpot so that when we bring a new person on, we don't have to spend a ton of time, you know, shadowing and sitting with them and showing them how to do stuff. We can plug them right into our business, into HubSpot and they can start, start running. They can see how, how does someone enter into our database? How does a prospect book a meeting with us? How do they, what forms are they filling out? Kind of how do they get incorporated into our, into our business? So I would say the number one thing is, is documenting and I would say the documenting has to fit with the right tool. And HubSpot, not only does it make it easy to document because it's so easy to use, but it's also so easy for someone to jump, like for us to plug in new team members and for them, you know, to start running right away as soon as they hit the ground.

Yeah, I love this. In my brain as you were talking, there was a mental picture of like wait, you mean I can see the things that they're doing and what makes success and then repeat success. Because it's documented in this platform that I'm using, like mind Blown. And for some businesses that are watching this because we're talking about the free tools, this might be a mind blowing moment. Here's where I want to take them though, from the mind blowing moment of like, man, I can use these free tools, I can start to document, I can start to save time, I can get out of email and meetings more and do that thing that I love. So. But here's the thing, you even mentioned it. You mentioned growing teams or growing to that next level of revenue in your last statement there. So what are. This is kind of a two, part, two part question, Andrew, to be honest with you. What are your thoughts on HubSpot growing with a company? So maybe they start with free, but then they're, you know, going in different directions as this revenue grows or as the team grows. And part two of that is are there more important hubs? Sales, marketing, service, operations, CMS, like whatever, whatever HubSpot comes out with in the future we should add that in there. Are there more important hubs than others or is that kind of just a question of like, it depends, like unpack that for me for a little bit.

Yeah, I would say, I think what I love about the free tools getting into, you know, this, the starter area of HubSpot and then into the professional is that really as, as a small business contact list or database grows, what kinds of things do you need? Well, as your list grows, you're going to need more automation. Right? You're going to, you're going to, you, you want to build into your platform more things like workflows, things that if this happens, I want to see this, this and this happen. I don't want to, I don't want a human being on my team to do that. I want the, the software platform to do that. When you're small, when you're just starting out, when you're on the free, the free tools, you don't need a lot of that because your database is small. It's still a reasonable size to get a team's head around. But as you grow your business, as you get better at delivering your product and adding value, your community grows, your database grows instead of adding more team members that are doing more manual things. What I love about HubSpot in terms of growth is that it builds in the automation capabilities that might have been in the future a small, a small business owner, as they grow might have thought, I need to add more people to the team to do this. HubSpot says you don't need to do that. We'll build in workflow, automation and things that will save the team time and then you can make much better strategic hires as you're growing in terms of maybe it's more delivery people, maybe, you know, as opposed to more people that are kind of doing more of the administrative functions that happen when you have disconnected systems. If I have my database over here, my website over here, my forms, my scheduler, if that's all kind of disconnected, I need to add people to administer that. Right. I need people to click and to do stuff. HubSpot by having everything integrated takes that away. And as the database grows, we can add in the automation capability that's going to save the whole team time.

Yeah, there's two things that I'm so glad that you bumped into. One, HubSpot is also providing this kind of spoken but unspoken all in one platform, right? The place where now admin actually becomes a little bit easier, ish than historically it might have been with these disparate pieces and tools that you're trying to almost kind of frankenstein together for your business. And I love, love, love Andrew, that you brought up automation not only for like the communication portion of it, but the process portion of it where it maybe doesn't need to be another human. Maybe it could be this machine that we program to do these menial tasks that now we can put the additional revenue into place that's going to impact the business the most. Absolutely love it. Which, by the way, this makes my brain go into like, gosh, there's got to be success stories that we can tell. So Andrew, what are some success stories that you personally have seen or had using HubSpot?

We used to run Salesforce. And when we ran, you know, our website was on WordPress. We used type form, we had PandaDoc for quotes. We used ConvertKit for email marketing. We had Intercom as our, as our chatbot. We used a tool called mixmax, which was for scheduling and email sequences. And then on top of that, we, we had a tool called scratchpad, which was a lightweight ability to update Salesforce. So because Salesforce can get clunky and complicated, we bought another tool that stood on top of Salesforce that made it easier for our, you know, our sales team to update their deals and opportunities. And then all those different tools we needed, we then needed Zapier to tie them all together, right, because they're disconnected, they, they aren't all integrated. We needed Zapier to, to, to be able to connect them. About, about three or four years ago, we decided that that was too many systems. It was just, it was chaos to administer and it was, they weren't, the database wasn't clean and we didn't have one view of our, of our contact across as a, as a prospect and into sales and into service. So we, we changed and we got rid of all of that and we consolidated all of those different things. Our website, our database, our email marketing, everything. We moved into HubSpot. And what, what, what we immediately found was that we had such a better view of the contacts all the way through and we were able to run our business so much more smoothly. And at the time I was actually running for my, for my day job, I was running marketing and sales. And it made my life as a, as a manager so much easier in terms of being able to, to, to see the entire, you know, the, the entire process. So, and what it, what, what it said to us is this is the right way to run a company in terms of using these, this tool to run the marketing, sales and service operations of a company. And we said, we've got to go out and start helping other, other companies that are struggling with this. Because we were struggling, we found a solution. We set it up, let's go help other people. Let's become a partner and help other people. So this was at the, the medium and large enterprise side. But for me, when I, when I began my project for small business that we talked about earlier, I realized that I wanted to build the website, I wanted to build the forms, I wanted to build everything. I wanted to do it myself. But I needed something. I'm not a developer, I'm not a graphic designer and I wanted something that I wanted to do it myself because I wanted to show small business owners that they could do it too. So I started with this, the free tools and then upgraded to the starter, the HubSpot starter. But the idea was I wanted to do it myself. I wanted to build the website and all the pieces to it to show a small business owner that you don't need a developer, a graphic designer, you know, an administrator. You don't, you don't need that. You can do it yourself. It is sometimes good to involve, you know, people into, into that process. But what I think for me personally is a big win is being able to be in full control of my website and, and the mechanisms that, that I use on my website and I, I know the ins and outs of it and I can talk intelligently to small business owners about the struggles that they have in running the marketing, sales and service aspects of their business.

So many good pieces there. One that I want to pull out is the fact that you said I wanted to do it myself so I could show others that it's possible. And you in that mentioned I wanted to have in my words, not yours, the keys to my kingdom. I wanted to be able to control my website. If you're a small to medium sized business and you're watching this and you're like, yeah, I wish I had my keys to my kingdom. That may be one of the number one reasons to think about HubSpot, CMS and these tools that Andrew and I are talking about today. Because man, we live in a world where the rate or the need for rapid change or updates or additions to your number one kind of window to the digital world is highly important. So if that is a hurdle for you, definitely think about this. Which was funny because I'm like preaching but also realize I'm, I'm talking about a mindset there that you almost have to have versus what you had back in the day of like the beginnings of the interwebs. And so Andrew, let's actually dig into that a little bit more and what are the mindsets Or a mindset that small business owners need to have around HubSpot. Because this, this quickly could become like a who moved my cheese? Scenario. We're making a dramatic transition in what we've historically done in Excel spreadsheets to a SaaS software. Like what mindsets do small business owners need to have around HubSpot as they think about implementing it for their business?

Yeah, George, two things there. One is realize that you need to save time wherever you can. Right? As a small business owner, your time is your most precious resource. And if you can find ways to save time, you need to capitalize on it. So if, if you're trying to, if, if you can't find any information in your business, if you can't. Where was that a text message? Was it an email? Did it come through Facebook Messenger? Where, where did that, where did that form get filled out? Where's that information? If you're, if you're spending a lot of time just trying to find stuff, just realize that that's taking away from you to being able to talk to a prospect, talk to a customer, improve a process, build a new product, come up with great social media content. Like all the things that, that you need to do to be successful in your business. If you're, if, if a large portion of that is trying to find stuff or fit stuff together, you've got to fix that because eventually if that ratio becomes too high of the finding versus creating, you, you can't grow your business. You're, you're just, you're, you're going to get stuck. So that's, number one, is be ruthless in trying to find ways to save time. Second, get in the mindset of everything needs to be documented. I, I, I love HubSpot, but I've seen, I have seen people use it incorrectly and I think that one of the reasons is because they haven't defined, they haven't documented for themselves. When do I use this tool and how do I use this tool and how do I ensure that my whole team uses it the same way. HubSpot is an amazing tool. Even the free, the free tools, I think are amazing. But imagine if you put five people into your free HubSpot portal and every single person does it differently. Some people put stuff in this property, other people put it in this property. Scheduling links are set up differently. Forms are not, you know, not connect. Like they're disconnected. They're not set up correctly. There should be a best practice. This is how we're going to use HubSpot. Let's, let's document it, let's define it. When people come in, we show them, here's our, our tool is HubSpot. Here's when we use it, and here's how we use it. And you know, in the first week when they do something, when they don't do it correctly, let's coach them, let's get them, let's coach them on, hey, I saw you do this. Here's, remember, remember, here's our, our how. Here's how we're doing this. Let's steer you back to that. Let's go back to our documentation and let's make sure that we're all using, using it correctly. So ruthless on time. Document everything. Because again, documenting everything to me is the key to growth. If we're going to grow and we're going to add new people, we need to make sure that when they step in, we don't just give them the keys to HubSpot and say, here's your Ferrari. Try to figure out how to use it. We haven't. We have the owner's manual, the owner's manual for the Ferrari. We're going to give them that as well and say, read this jump in this Ferrari because we're, you know, we're going with this car.

Yeah, Such good stuff. Actually, that's probably the rewind point of the interview. Because, community, if you pay attention to what Andrew said about documenting those foundational fundamentals and coaching your team along the way, then you won't have to hire me in two years to come in and do a HubSpot audit to take, tell you how to fix your stuff. So I'm trying to save you money right now. Just like rewind, listen to what Andrew said and it will pay off in spades in the long run. Andrew, one of the things that I like to try to do here too on these interviews is just kind of pull out some words of wisdom that somebody can kind of ride with. It might be action oriented. It might set their mind free. And so with that, what are some words of wisdom that you would leave the audience about building and growing their business in general, whether it's with HubSpot tools or just the fact of, look, this is kind of the journey you're on. And here's some words of wisdom.

Yeah, I think I mentioned this earlier, George, but the key one is don't think that you can't do it because you're not a developer or you're, you know, I, I think that one thing I'm really against are tools that Create such a high barrier to entry or such a high learning curve that it takes like only the most advanced people can figure out how to use them. What I love about HubSpot is that it's an easy tool to use and to understand how it works and it's intuitive and they're always making it better, they're always changing it. So as a small business owner I really think that you can become a power user. Even the per, even the person that's sitting back saying, I'm not a tech savvy person. I, I struggle with, you know, technology and software and systems. I really feel like HubSpot has been built for you in mind. And so to me that's empowering because as a consultant, one thing I don't want people to become is dependent on me. I don't want people to be, feel like I can't touch this thing because if I touch it, it's going to break. And you know, with documentation and with good training and with good usage, it's not going to break. You will be able to, to use this and because it's so important that you, you use it and that you model using it to your team. Like the last thing I would want is to set up this great system and then, and then the owner of the business doesn't use it or doesn't know how to use it and the rest of the team is left with wondering what's the deal here? How come he or she is not using this, this powerful tool that we have. Right? So that's, that's the first one and the second one. George, I would say as a small business, business owner, I really think you should focus on building a community less so on how do I make money? Every business needs to make money. I'm not saying that you, you shouldn't make money, but I also feel like with HubSpot you can build a community of people that go to you as the go to resource. I, for me personally I want to be a go to resource for small businesses when it comes to their systems. I want to be almost like a chief technology officer for small businesses. And so Rick, you know, I'm focused on building that community of people and I don't think that, you know, from day one it should be, the focus should be how do I monetize that. I really feel like a small business owner, especially using a tool like HubSpot can build a community of people that will eventually say take my money. You're, you're so good at this and you're so passionate. You know what you're talking about? Here's my money because it doesn't make any sense not to work with you. So that those are the two, the two big ones for me.

And ladies and gentlemen, those are some great words of wisdom. Andrew, if people want to become part of your community, if they want to ask you questions, if they just got mad value and want to buy you a steak dinner, who knows, where do you want to send them?

My website is small business systems professionals.com it's sbsyspro.com SBS pro.com also LinkedIn is where I try to give, I try to provide a lot of value there and connect with people. And so it's Andrew j. Parks on LinkedIn. But I'd love to, love to connect and help small business owners save time and document their businesses so they can grow.

Well, there you go, community. It's another interview to help you amp up or power up your small business. With HubSpot, we've talked, talked about some free tools. We've gotten strategy and words of wisdom. So now all you have to do is take action on the education that you just got. That's right. Go out and execute while you're executing. Remember, be a happy, helpful, humble human and we'll see you in the next video or interview right here on Hubbed Helper.