094: Top 5 Tools That Power My Business

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

If you've read Freetime or been listening to this podcast for any amount of time, you know that I am obsessed with software. In fact, I consider tools to be my number one team member. They are my right hand. They are my personal assistant. They are my project manager. They are my automation helpers. They do so much for my business. At the time of this recording, I pay for 60 monthly recurring services. A couple of those are in person, office or coworking space for a total of $2,400 a month. Now if you took out the co working space and some of the personal like fitness tracking, it could definitely be under 2,000amonth. It might sound a lot to those of you who have a little bit of sticker shock and you think oh my goodness, what are you doing paying for all that software? But to me it replaces one, if not five different team members because of what I've been able to automate, document and make easier in terms of our business. It also means that the team members I do currently have my delightfully tiny team where nobody works full time that they do less in the business. So I'm also in a way saving what I pay each team member because so much of what we do is automated. If you haven't already gotten my full business tech toolkit with all of those software services listed, visit itsfreetime.com join when you sign up for the Time well Spent newsletter, not only will you get my favorite tips and tools every Friday, but you'll also get access to that recurring services spreadsheet. That spreadsheet is not just some static bonus that I created for you, it's actually where I track my software spending so it's always up to date and it might give you some ideas about how you can simplify, automate and systematize your business as well now surely 60 services is gonna be overwhelming for a lot of you and you know, you might have subscription fatigue. So I was giving some thought to what are the top five must have tools that I use every single day in my business? And could I share those here with you? The answer is yes. So without further ado, let me get into the top five tools that power my business. And of course there are some second runners up. There are some services that are almost like utilities. They run seamlessly in the background. I'll get to those next number one Notion it is not a secret that I am obsessed. Notion has replaced Asana, Trello, Airtable, Docs, Sheets, and Evernote, even a few more than that in my business. So instead of paying for all of those services, as soon as I discovered Notion, I consolidated our entire business operations into this incredible platform. Now I've talked about Notion so much on this podcast that I'm not going to get into too much detail, but just know that it is possible to customize your own dashboard to have tasks that you and your team are working on your manager manual, which is a crucial part of the Free Time framework and easier operating with ease and joy. You can have personal pages, collection buckets. I wrote Free Time largely by starting in Notion and again, I've documented a ton of that here on the podcast. But I will just say that my team and I barely have to leave Notion to do our jobs. So we can see. I look at content, calendars, podcast production. We just recently created an email guide. You're going to hear more about that soon on the podcast, if not already. And the goal in my mind is that absolutely all information about running our business, including who's enrolled in what programs, lives in Notion. That way we never have to leave and every business area is able to be easily linked and referenced to other areas. All within Notion I was getting kind of tired of. Even though I love cloud based systems like Google Docs and Sheets, we still had a zillion different links that we needed to open up at any given time. And oh shoot, this email doesn't have access to that doc. And then the really long docs like the manager manual would get super unwieldy. Notion allows us to consolidate all of that in one place, but also customize the views to different team members based on the information that they need to access in that moment. The second tool that I use almost every day is Kajabi and I'll put all these links in the show notes if you want to check out these tools. Usually yes I have an affiliate link which does give me some referral bonus, but I also like to share affiliate links with you because usually they get you some kind of good deal for signing up or an extended trial. A lot of these companies offer bonuses on both sides, so Kajabi is this great all in one solution for managing email. That's where I send my newsletters from for both Free Time and Pivot List. You can in addition to sending one off messages, like most email services, you can also create sequences. So if you sign up for Time well spent at itsfreetime.com join, you'll be added to the welcome to Time well Spent sequence that every time I learn this from Alan Dibb, we'll link to his episode in the show Notes. Every time I send a weekly missive to my list, I actually evergreen that content. That's a verb meaning I take out any dated references and I program them. I add that into the welcome to Time well Spent series. That means right Now I have 90 days of content. So if you sign up tomorrow, you will be squared away reading all of the best that I have to offer for at least 90 days if I didn't send a single new message. Kajabi is also where I create forms for different bonuses. So when you join Time well Spent, Squarespace connects to Kajabi via a zap zapier.com and that way I can tag where you're coming from. Similarly, if you download the Freetime toolkit or you want access to it because really there's nothing to download and you go to itsfreetime.com toolkit, Squarespace has a zap that connects that information to Kajabi and I've also created a zap that then connects that information to my Notion database so that I never have to leave Notion to see who's interested in the toolkit. Maybe in the Free Time Operations Dashboard. And more specifically, as I've shared in the book and on this show, my philosophy of always be listening. By sending that information to Notion, I'm able to also ask what is your biggest challenge at the moment? And by quickly looking at that information right in my Notion view. As I'm getting ready to record a podcast like this one, I can see what types of content would be most helpful to add in. Kajabi is also a course hosting platform, so when I create courses like the Free Up Founder Time Mini Course or even the Freetime Audiobook as a backup way to offer that to people who want to purchase it, or maybe they get audiobook access as a Bonus part of another program. You can build out courses in Kajabi too. So it's not that every aspect of Kajabi is the very best software you could find for that specific function, but the reason that I like it is it's all together in one platform. I can even manage my own affiliate programs. So for example, if you become an affiliate to sell free up founder time, I'm just making this up. The course is $20. Maybe you're going to get $10 for every referral. I can create that program and manage it through Kajabi as well. Finally, another thing that Kajabi offers is the ability to create events and different pipelines leading up to a type of event. So if I'm going to do a webinar like my recent one on three Must have business systems, Kajabi actually has this really nice kind of one click pipeline template where I write a few emails leading up to the event. The event details are included, it provides a registration page and a thank you for registering page and then the post event follow up emails. It's just all there templatized. It's not that you couldn't build this on your own and there are certainly services like LeadPages that would allow you to do the same thing. But again, I just love that it's all in one place. I just log into Kajabi and this is where I power the online services part of my business. The third tool that I mentioned a couple times already in terms of getting my software to talk to each other is Zapier. I don't even know where to begin to tell you my love of Zapier. It does so much. It is definitely an additional team member in my business automates everything from adding new BFF community members directly to our Circle community and calendar invites to things like transferring podcast guests data when they sign up to be interviewed in Calendly. It ports that information over into a notion card in our content calendar. So then when I know that I have a podcast interview coming up, their email, what they're excited to talk about, all of that information is already in a notion card with their name on it. So I know who's coming up, what day is their interview and I don't have to fill in those blanks when I see that they've actually scheduled the interview in Calendly. Zapier can do so much more. It can do things like text message you when a purchase over a certain dollar amount comes in. The list is truly endless and I don't want to put you to sleep by telling you about the dozens and dozens of apps and zaps that I use it with. Let's just say if there's sort of busy work in your business, it's very likely that you could automate it with Zapier and take that off of everybody's plate, including your own.

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The fourth tool that I use every single day is Help Scout. Help Scout is an email client that allows us to manage our team email inboxes. It's a little different than Gmail in the sense that it aggregates. So yes, we do have Gmail apps for business and I have my personal Gmail account. But in Help Scout the entire team can log in, see what messages have come in, we can assign them to each other and we can also write notes to each other. So this is really good for managing the main two inboxes helloivittmethod.com and hi@itsfreetime.com so none of us manage our personal email through Help Scout. But it means that as messages come in, you know, we don't really know who they're going to be from what they're going to be about. Anybody can jump in to troubleshoot and again we can correspond using notes back and forth about what do we do, who does this go to? Maybe the team sometimes has questions. You can also save drafts for somebody else to take over. And another feature that I really like is you can see customer communication history. So it's good to be able to click on that email address and see the full history of the customer rather than having these messages kind of stuck and living in other people on the team's individual email boxes. I also get nervous with things like Gmail. Even if you give delegate access to somebody, which is possible, it still is a little bit confusing. Do they mark things red if they've seen them or mark unread? They might draft a message, but you can't really correspond about an email with another person within your Gmail inbox. So Help Scout helps us go pro in terms of communication with clients and customers and correspond, I would say much more efficiently and effectively than we would be if we were just using Gmail. The fifth must have tool that we use all the time is Canva. Now don't forget there are some runners up that I'm going to share that are just like breathing in our business. So first let me tell you why I love Canva. It is so incredible how quickly you can create very simple ads and graphics. But I also use Canva to lay out complex PDFs and printed assets like the Freetime press release and the Leader toolkit. I have created really fancy looking overviews of pivot programs that corporate clients might download. PDF that talks about my keynote speaking. Kind of like a sizzle file if you will of what workshops I offer my bio, next steps to sign up if you want to hire me to speak. I also love the mobile app. There was a day where I was just tired. I think it was right during launch week, but I knew I wanted to create little postcards asking if people who attended the in person launch party in New York City would be willing to leave a review as a thank you for getting a free book. And so right from my phone I created this little postcard. Canva even has a send to print feature. So I sent it to print at a downtown where I could pick it up at a FedEx downtown kind of close to the launch party. And I think I created these on a Saturday. They were ready on Monday. The launch party in New York City was on a Tuesday. And then we had these gorgeous postcards that I could insert into every single book. And I didn't even use my computer. I did that entirely from my phone. Canva is also incredible. Stephanie and Haley just put together this gorgeous launch scrapbook. You can have a link to share with other people where you share almost a presentation version of something so they're not getting access to edit the files but they use that to share but have a lot of graphic support. I've even learned how to create animated video sequences. I used to feel kind of helpless when I wanted to create a 10 second video intro and video outro. Like a little sizzle pre roll thing. It's hard to explain but something like the Freetime book trailer. I always used to have to hire professional help for that. Now I actually use Canva. There's little video animation templates so my love for Canva is boundless of how simple it makes design stuff. I still do recommend having somebody at some point do a brand strategy for your business because that's what makes Canva ing simpler. Where you actually have a brand, you have a strategy, you have logo files, you have assets. Then you can leverage their templates to put it all together. Those are the five must have now the ones running in the background are Dropbox. I store all of my files on Dropbox. Period. End of story. Nothing goes on my laptop so that if my laptop breaks, it falls into the ocean. It gets stolen off the New York City subway. Knock on wood please. I hope that that doesn't happen. I'm always worried about it when I take it with me that at least as sad as I would be to lose my laptop, at least none of my files would be irrecoverable. So Dropbox everything goes in Dropbox we have a team shared account and that way my team doesn't also have to ask me where to find certain files. It's all there. So that's always running in the background. I have a love hate relationship with Slack. It is an amazing tool, but it needs to be used sparingly. Sometimes my team and I will fall into a habit of quickly sending Slack messages back and forth and I always have to kind of pull back. Usually that happens when I Jenny have not been good about checking notifications in Notion and people realize oh, I could get ahold of Jenny much faster if I send her a Slack message. But just recently I had to remind everybody I said listen, it's no one's fault. I mean if anyone's fault it's my own. But Slack makes me jumpy. If it's not urgent or super quick, that would enable you to keep moving with your work. Please write back in Notion and if you haven't heard after a day or two then you can send me a Slack and remind me. But instead of having Slack be the default like I think a lot of teams coordinate in Slack and communicate in Slack all day long. That would drive me crazy. Like absolutely crazy. Like I said, it makes me jumpy because my team and I have a rule that Slack is for time sensitive or urgent clients or important requests. And so when I get a Slack message, I stop what I'm doing and I go check it because I want to make sure I'm not the bottleneck getting in the way of my team getting work done or getting back to VIP clients or important situations. So I had to remind everybody, okay, let's try to go back to Notion now as our main number one now that we're through the launch and then use Slack sparingly. And that's been working. That said, it's always there. It's usually open in the background of my computer just in case anybody needs anything and I like it. So it's running in the background. It's not my daily go to, it's not my preferred for communic, but it's there and it's super helpful when people do need something. And we have channels that map to the same areas of our manager manual of our email folders of everything in the business usually has the same nomenclature, even the task categories. I briefly mentioned Docs and Sheets. Of course, we do still use Docs to collaborate if we're writing something where you really want to track changes. One Stone Creative, the podcast production team, they send me show notes to review in Docs. I would probably be able to do that in Notion, but Notion doesn't have the True Track changes feature and some people still prefer Docs because maybe they like the fact that okay, you can have a Google Drive folder and it can have the audio and the show notes and the promo assets and it can all live in a nicely organized cloud based folder. So no shade to Google and Docs and Sheets. They've served me well for so long. I still run my presentations in Google Slides, but it is no longer my default daily platform with 60 subscriptions. I have surely missed some. This is probably one of those podcasts where as soon as I'm done recording, maybe half an hour from now, I'm going to go shoot. I left off the perfect tool that I use constantly. See, like one just came to mind right now. Textexpander, that's another one that's like a utility in my business. It's always, always open in the background and I'm always expanding little snippets and whether it's emoji snippets, links that I need to populate, sometimes affiliate links that I have those all saved in textexpander. So see, there's another one. It's always always running in the background. We could categorize it as creation and communication tools. Again, the top five are Notion, Kajabi, Help, Scout, Zapier, and Canva and then let's call it the Utility tools. So Slack, Dropbox, Text Expander, Google Docs, Sheets and slides. Those are always kind of hovering nearby and they're the gas we put in the car to keep everything moving smoothly. Like premium octane, whatever. I'm in New York, I don't have a car, so been a while since I've been at the pump and even know what premium gas is called. You get the idea though. I would love to hear what must have tools you use. I didn't even mention Riverside fm, but that's been phenomenal for doing podcast interviews. I don't use it for a solo show like this one. This I'm recording into GarageBand, which comes with the Mac. So I would just love to know what tools are on your must have list or your daily go to rotation and then which ones power everything else behind the scenes. You can send me a voice memo@itsfreetime.com ask. I look forward to hearing from you and I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day. Everybody.

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