MBA1897 How to Choose The Right Tools + Free Ride Friday

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night, not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things, of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA show. Because a successful business isn't built alone, that's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today is Free Ride Friday. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away a brand new free ride. It's called the Automated webinar challenge. 30 days to learn how to build the ultimate automated webinar. To build your email list and make sales on Autopilot. It retails for $99 over at webinar ninja.com awc or you can just win it for free. Just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday like today to see if you won. We'll be announc this week's winner later on in the episode. In today's episode you will learn how to choose the right tools for your business. Keywords here for your business. So many people ask me what is the right software for this? For that? What's the best way to create a website? What's the Best service for customer service chat. What about payment processors? What should I use for that? So instead of me going down the line telling you all the different tools that I recommend for your business, I'm going to give you a matrix. I'm going to give you some questions to ask yourself so you can know how to choose the best tools for your business so you're not paying for something that you don't need or you're not going to use. This is incredibly important. If you run a self funded, bootstrapped, independent business, every dollar counts. So let's make sure we get the most value out of the tools we buy. I'll show you how in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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As your business grows, as you start to scale, as you start bringing in customers, you're gonna need more and more tools and different pieces of software to make it all happen. Whether it's your email marketing software or your website, or how you manage customer service inquiries or chat or payment processors or how to print swag or how to sell your products online. I can go on and on and on. Okay. And every time you're about to choose a new tool to run your business or help run your business, you're faced with the question, which one? How do I choose from all the different options, all the competitors? Well, that's what today's episode is all about. Every business has different needs. And those needs are based on what you do, who you serve, where you are in your business journey, and of course, your budget. Speaking of budget, what you'll learn is that a lot of these tools are a fantastic value. And if you pay more, it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get more. In fact, sometimes when you pay for an expensive software or an expensive tool, you're burdened with a lot of things you don't need and you don't actually use. So when I go shopping around for tools, I have a set of questions that I ask myself so that I can be laser focused in making a decision. So let's go through those questions now. So the first question is kind of obvious, but you actually have to get crystal clear on it yourself first before you start shopping around. And that question is, what do I need the tool to do? What do I actually need to get done? I really encourage you to actually write down the answer to this question in a sentence. For example, if you were looking for a tool to be able to answer your customer queries like support tickets and chats, I would really get laser focused and ask myself, hey, what do I actually need to get done here? What needs to be accomplished? Well, actually I just need an easy shared inbox so me and my team can answer customer emails and I kind of want to be able to do live chat as well. So just write down what you actually need because sometimes you'll get lost if you start searching and looking and start thinking you need things you don't. So before you even look at anything, write down what you actually need to do. Now. Next question. And this is all before I even start shopping around, right? And before I even look at any websites or any of my options or any of the comparison sites or any of that stuff. Next question I ask myself is, what am I going to need the tool to do two years from now? Anything different? Do I want to expand in any area? So for example, in this customer support tool example, maybe I'm going to want to be able to field comments or questions on my social profiles with the same tool. I don't really need that right now, but maybe in the future I want to go into that. Maybe in the future I want to go into phone support only. Write down the things you know that you're going to put into your plan, your strategic plan as a business. If you know you're not going to do full and support in the future, don't write that down. All right, third question, and this is a question you're going to ask the actual tool or find the answer on their website as you go and compare. And that question is, how hard is it for you to switch out, to switch out into another software? How hard is it to leave that platform and migrate to another? Can you export your data so that you can then take it and import it somewhere else? Why is this important? Because if it's easy to switch out, then the risk of choosing this product is very low. Because if you outgrow it one day, it's not a big deal. It's not going to take you months to untangle yourself from that tool. Number four, how much can I spend? How much can I invest in this tool annually? And I like to look at an annual price because often these tools will give me a good healthy discount if I choose annual. And if you don't know, you should know. Look at your P and L, look at your profit and loss sheet. Find out how much money can you allocate to something like this and set your price. This is so important. A lot of people don't do this. And then they start going and searching for all these different types of tools and they start price comparisons and like, well, this one's like $10 less, but this one has this thing, and that's a big time waster, I'm telling you right now. Instead, have a budget. Know how much you can spend or feel comfortable spending. Just say, for example, I say, I don't want to spend more than $2,000 on this tool a year because that's what I can afford. That's what is within my budget. And the reason why this is the last question, because that's the last question I ask myself when I'm shopping around. So let's say, for example, I answered all these questions on a document. I have my answers to all four questions. And now I'm going to start my search. Now I start looking at all the different opt for the tool I'm looking for. I look at my first question. What do I need to actually get done? Okay, does this tool do that? Yes, it does. What do I want to do in the next two years? Does it do that? Okay. Is it easy to migrate out? Okay. And lastly, is it within my budget? Can I afford this tool given the needs I have and the plan I'm going to choose? If the answer is yes, it makes my job so much easier to choose. And what I actually do is just a habit of procurement for my business. I look at least three different options and I give each question a point value. So each question is worth one point. If the answer is fulfilled by that tool, they get a point. So the one that gets the highest point value wins. That's the one I choose. Now, if there's a tie, I literally just choose the one that looks like I would enjoy using more. And this is why it's the tiebreaker. This is why it's one of those things that makes a make or break decision. Because if you don't enjoy using a product, if it's not easy to use, if it's not simple if it's not intuitive, you're just not going to use it. You're not going to get the most out of it. You're not going to reap the benefits of your investment, you're not going to get a return on investment. And you should see these things as investments. Okay? You're investing in a tool so you can deliver a better service for your customers, so that you can have a better business and get more customers. And that's basically it. This makes it super simple because it's basically you're on a mission. You know exactly what you're looking for. The other reason why I use this method is because it removes me from the decision making process. I'm using a system. It's almost like I'm making a decision for another person's business. Okay? And by having a buffer between me and the decision, meaning there's actual protocol or procurement process, which are these four questions in the system, it makes the whole thing a lot more objective and allows you to feel more confident that you're making the right decision when you choose a tool. Now, there is one caveat to the system. If you find a tool that ticks all the boxes but does not offer a free trial, a free plan, a sandbox, a money back guarantee, to me, that is a deal breaker. I do not do that. Why? Because I actually need to see this tool in action with my own business, with my own needs to make sure it's a good fit. I need that buffer time. If it doesn't offer that, then that's a red flag for me. That's somebody who's not putting their money where their mouth is, doesn't believe in their product. I need a product that I can actually touch, feel, use, implement in my own business to ensure that, yes, I made the right decision to confirm my decision. And believe it or not, there's still a lot of tools out there that don't have some sort of freemium or money back guarantee. So that's a great way for you to just cut out the players that just are not going to work for you. It's going to make your decision a little bit easier.

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To wrap up today's lesson. I love having a system to help me make decisions because as a business owner, you're making decisions left and right all day long. And anytime you're going to open up your business's wallet, so to speak, to pay for a new tool, you need to make sure that it's going to give you the value you so that you can grow your business. These are again, all investments you only should be paying for something that you're actually going to use and benefit from. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show, but today's episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is Vanessa Verli. Vanessa says wellness educator and coach, five stars. I just found this podcast and was on a three hour car drive and listened to as many episodes as I could. I kept having to pull over to jot down notes. Thank you Omar Nicole for giving your gifts. So grateful. Well, thanks Vanessa for that amazing review and thanks for being safe and pulling over to write down your notes. You are our Free Eyed Friday winner. Go ahead and email me over at omar@100mba.net so I can hook you up with the Free Ride to the Automated Webinar challenge over@webinarninja.com AWC. It retails for $99, but it's yours for free. You won the Free Ride. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday just like today to see if you want. It's that easy. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. A lot of people ask, should I go with a tool, a software that's fairly new? Should I go to with a more established player that's been around for a while? And my answer is it depends. Really it does. You have to take a look at the tool itself because there are a lot of new tools that actually attack the problem you're trying to solve in a new and innovative way and it's actually worth checking them out and supporting them. And some of the older legacy tools are just more reliable and kind of just do what they're supposed to do. I'm actually more open to trying new tools, especially with areas of my business that are not mission critical, that don't affect the customer's experience too much. But at the same time I'd like to do a little bit of research on the founders of the company of that new tool. It gives me a glimpse of how dedicated they are, how much just general business experience do they have or in this marketplace and if I align with their mission and values. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Foreign.

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