When first starting our business, we vividly remember feeling drained from all the daily business tasks. They can begin to pile up quickly when you are wearing all the hats. Early on, we realized we could not keep pace without feeling overworked and exhausted. We began brainstorming a better way to get organized. During our brainstorming, we realized that a lot of our tasks could be automated and handled by business tools. Thus, our research began.
The Goal of Using Business Tools
Our mission was clear: to find the best business tools to allow for a better work-life balance. We want to free up as much time as possible to focus on our business growth and what we love doing. Focus on tasks that fit our “genius zone.” A genius zone is the balance between what you are really good at and what you love doing, to put it simply.
Below, we want to share our favorite business tools and how they have helped us in our business. More importantly, they allowed us to have a better work-life balance. Let’s dive in!
1.) Dubsado – Business Management
When we first met Dubsado, we knew the platform was for us. We were looking for ease of use. Dubsado is our go-to platform for our client management system. We use Dubsado to send our client applications, proposals, contracts, welcome emails, and homework forms. Each client gets their own project, where all the information is kept to easily reflect on past projects, ongoing projects, or upcoming projects.
Finding this client management system, to put it simply, freed up a lot of our time. And continues to do so. We still see how much time it saves us on a daily basis. Set up a few templates and workflows with Dubsado, and you begin to see your schedule free up from all those repetitive business tasks.
2.) Canva – Graphic Design
Graphics made easy. We use Canva Pro to streamline our graphics for social media, blogs, portfolio items, and much more. The pro version makes it super easy to create templates for team members to reuse or to make things super quick for yourself. If you’re not sure if Canva Pro is what you need at this time, give it a test run with their free account. To be honest, they pack a lot of great features in their free plan, so you may not need the pro version right away. Do what feels right for you and your business.
We truly hope this platform makes a huge difference in your business’s efficiency. We all know how demanding marketing can sometimes be, especially with social media. Any time saver with social media is a win in our book!
3.) Grammarly – Everything Writing
Grammarly is our go-to writing assistant for anything that entails writing. It seamlessly integrates into our business, ensuring that every document, email, or piece of content is free from grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and stylistic inconsistencies. With Grammarly, we enhance the clarity and professionalism of our written communication. Even the best English majors can overlook a simple comma or hyphen. It’s hard to be 100% perfect all the time in all your writing. Grammarly makes it easy to spot any commas we may missed or those sneaky hyphens we overlook. It has been a great business tool!
4.) FloDesk – Email Marketing
What’s not to like about Flodesk? We are excited to share this great email marketing platform. FloDesk is an easy-to-use email marketing platform with great pre-designed templates, email workflows, and easy integration for collecting email addresses.
We use Flodesk for our email marketing efforts. If you sign up for one of our freebies, FloDesk walks you down a path of automated emails to provide you with the utmost value without bombarding you’re inbox. Seriously, this platform handles anything email-related for us, and we love it. Huge time saver!
5.) Dreamhost – Our WordPress Website Host
One of our favorite sustainability-focused website hosts. We use them for our website. More specifically, their Dreampress plan. Dreamhost has amazing customer support, which is another big reason why we chose them for our hosting. They truly value their customers, and it shows in their support. The primary reason is their green hosting mindset. To us, the benefit of knowing our website is going to be up and running with a company with great customer support is well worth it. Especially knowing we are staying as carbon-neutral as we can with our online presence.
The other big reason we went with Dreamhost for our WordPress hosting is that we knew our website was going to continue to grow and wanted a website host we could grow with. Investing in a reliable website host saves a lot of future headaches.
In Conclusion
Business tools are a great time saver. No doubt about it! The tools we mentioned above have been game-changers in our business efforts. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to focus on growing our business and doing what we enjoy doing. The goal is to do what is in your genius zone. What do we mean by genius zone? We like to describe your genius zone as the mix between what you love to do and what you are really great at. Think of it as what comes to you naturally, and it’s something you enjoy.
We hope you are able to bring some business tools into your entrepreneurial life to allow you to focus more time in your genius zone. If you have any questions on these business tools, don’t hesitate to reach out. Also, let us know if there are any business tools you love that allow you a better work-life balance. We get it… It is exciting to free up your time!
