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Get More Done with Our Preferred Tools

Figuring out which tools to use to grow your business can be a daunting, time-intensive prospect. We know this because we’ve been doing it for the last decade, and when we dive into research mode, we go deep. It generally takes us at least 20 hours of research and a few months of actual use before we’ll recommend something as not all that glitters is gold, especially when you look under the first layer. Instead of spending your valuable time and money doing the research and experimentation we’ve already done, take a peek at the list below.

Some of the links below are referral links, and at no additional cost to you, we will earn a commission if you decide to use them or make a purchase. The commission does not bias my recommendation but does compensate me for the time and effort to research on your behalf and share my thoughts. If I wouldn’t recommend a solution to someone I care about without a commission, it doesn’t show up here, either.

I start with our Featured Solutions, which are my list of Must Haves in my business at this time and then guide you through different solution categories that are organized in the order in which you’re likely to need them as your business grows.

Featured Solutions

Quip calls itself a document collaboration service, but we’re using it as a knowledgebase and portal to reign in the sprawl of documents we have all over the place. The thing we love the most about it is that it allows us to place for for-real spreadsheets, timelines, and kanban boards (for tracking projects) all in the same document alongside text. It also has a Zapier integration, which means it cuts out hours a week of moving text around. Quip allows us to be faster at finding information, making decisions, and collaboration. It has a free trial, so you can try it and see if it makes your sprawl more manageable, too.

Asana is my #1 recommendation for task and project management systems, both for collaborative teams and for individuals. With features like multiple nested to-do lists, an action item being able to live in multiple projects, and the ability to set up default tasks and projects, it’s a flexible and powerful tool for ensuring that the right stuff gets done. It’s been great for our team to know exactly who is responsible for what step in a project and allows our work to keep flowing because when it’s time for someone to step in for their part of the project they get notified. No more waiting and wondering or lag time between phases of a project! Best of all, it’s free for fewer than 15 users.

Gusto is the payroll service we recommend and use, whether you are just hiring your first employee or have an ever-expanding team. It’s significantly cheaper and better than ADP, their customer service is fantastic, and it’s so easy to use. They take care of so many things: automatically paying employees, getting everything filed with federal, state, and local taxes, quarterly and year end reports, administering medical and other benefits, and so much more. You can manage independent contractor payments pretty easily from there, too. ICs really appreciate not having to eat fees and it’s nice not to have 8 different ways to keep up with your contractors’ invoices and payments.

Zapier allows you to create integrations between your various cloud-based solutions. For instance, you can have an action in one service trigger an action in another; i.e,. a form submission on your website can create a new contact and case in your CRM and add that information to a list in your email marketing system. This is great because you don’t have to choose all-in-one business solutions that are usually mediocre at all the things they do – instead, you can choose best-in-class focused solutions and automagically tie them to other best-in-class focused solutions. Zapier does its magic in the background, saving our team hours of time a month. For those of you who aren’t “tech savvy” it’s OK, as Zaps only require a few simple clicks to set up. Our business is built on Zaps and once you check out this service you’ll understand why. It’s hard to imagine running our business without Zapier.

Sumo has been a game-changer for us when it comes to growing our list and readership; for comparison, we went from about 181 signups per month in April 2016 to having a trendline of 700 signups per month now (with a fantastic 1.9k signups in January). Sumo is a suite of apps that you can install, play with, and uninstall on the fly. The consolidated dashboard helps you see what’s working and the split-testing tools are the best I’ve come across as far as ease of use goes. For us, the core of Sumo is its four list-building and attention-directing apps (List Builder, Scroll Bar, Smart Bar, and Welcome Mat) that each allow you to experiment with different ways of inviting people to join your community or get your best stuff.

Productivity Solutions

Keep your business organized and running smoothly with these solutions.

TimeTrade — If scheduling with clients is a part of your business this is the solution to make your scheduling headaches a thing of the past. It’ll keep you from playing pick-and-choose via email, which is terribly inefficient and can lose you clients because of the frustration involved. TimeTrade integrates with Google Calendar, converts to the viewer’s time zone, and sends a reminder email about the appointment two days out. A particular draw is that it shows only your availability rather than showing when you’re booked.

SaneBox — SaneBox is a Gmail extension that does a fantastic job of pre-sorting the emails that come in so that only the email that matters gets into your Inbox. Less important emails are automagically sent to different folders for you to handle at a different time. Imagine only addressing the most important things in your Inbox instead of getting stuck in the black hole of doom and coming out hours later and still not having gotten to the most important business in your inbox. I’ve had assistants check my email, and SaneBox does better than they did. This resource saves me hours a week and I now can’t live without it!

DropBox — Dropbox is the near-ubiquitous file storage and sharing service. Easy to find files synced across all of your devices and no more questioning whether or not you have the correct version of a collaborative document...yes, please. It’s easy to use, affordable, and so common that developers know they’ll need to provide Dropbox integration with their software.

Quip — Quip calls itself a document collaboration service, but we’re using it as a knowledgebase and portal to reign in the sprawl of documents we have all over the place. The thing we love the most about it is that it allows us to place for for-real spreadsheets, timelines, and kanban boards (for tracking projects) all in the same document alongside text. It also has a Zapier integration, which means it cuts out hours a week of moving text around. Quip allows us to be faster at finding information, making decisions, and collaboration. It has a free trial, so you can try it and see if it makes your sprawl more manageable, too.

Zapier — Zapier allows you to create integrations between your various cloud-based solutions. For instance, you can have an action in one service trigger an action in another; i.e,. a form submission on your website can create a new contact and case in your CRM and add that information to a list in your email marketing system. This is great because you don’t have to choose all-in-one business solutions that are usually mediocre at all the things they do – instead, you can choose best-in-class focused solutions and automagically tie them to other best-in-class focused solutions. Zapier does its magic in the background, saving our team hours of time a month. For those of you who aren’t “tech savvy” it’s OK, as Zaps only require a few simple clicks to set up. Our business is built on Zaps and once you check out this service you’ll understand why. It’s hard to imagine running our business without Zapier.

Collaborative Project Management Solutions

There are a lot of project management solutions available, but these three are the best in terms of usability, simplicity, and ubiquitousness. As the heading suggests, they aren’t necessarily the best if you don’t work in collaborative settings because they contain a lot of features an individual working solo wouldn’t need.

Asana — Asana is my #1 recommendation for task and project management systems, both for collaborative teams and for individuals. With features like multiple nested to-do lists, an action item being able to live in multiple projects, and the ability to set up default tasks and projects, it’s a flexible and powerful tool for ensuring that the right stuff gets done. It’s been great for our team to know exactly who is responsible for what step in a project and allows our work to keep flowing because when it’s time for someone to step in for their part of the project they get notified. No more waiting and wondering or lag time between phases of a project! Best of all, it’s free for fewer than 15 users.

Slack — Slack is a great team communication tool. There are many different ways that people describe Slack, but it comes down to being a cross between instant messaging, email, video conferencing, and team manager. Rather than context switching among many apps – or getting lost in email – we do 99% of our internal communication in Slack. A killer feature is being able to forward emails to channels and Direct Messages, as we’re able to pull conversations out of email quickly, discuss them, and then keep the process going. Slack also has integrations with many other applications that you already use (Google Drive, Dropbox, Zoom, Twitter, Paypal, Asana, Zapier, and the list goes on), so all notifications you might want can be seen in Slack.

Google Suite — Businesses small and large love Google suite because it has put many of the things you need to run your business into one place. Your mail, calendar, messaging, video conferencing, documents, forms, file saving and sharing, and more are all found in one place and all talk to and connect with one another.

Website Solutions

The solutions below are the foundation of your website.

Sumo — Sumo has been a game-changer for us when it comes to growing our list and readership; for comparison, we went from about 181 signups per month in April 2016 to having a trendline of 700 signups per month now (with a fantastic 1.9k signups in January). Sumo is a suite of apps that you can install, play with, and uninstall on the fly. The consolidated dashboard helps you see what’s working and the split-testing tools are the best I’ve come across as far as ease of use goes. For us, the core of Sumo is its four list-building and attention-directing apps (List Builder, Scroll Bar, Smart Bar, and Welcome Mat) that each allow you to experiment with different ways of inviting people to join your community or get your best stuff.

WordPress — WordPress is the most popular Content Management Solution available. It’s free, you can find affordable designers and developers to support you, and it has more plugins and extensions than any other solution (so much so that it can be overwhelming). Most people think of WordPress as a blogging platform, but it makes setting up simple websites a breeze. If you’re setting up a website for your small business, you’ll want to host your own install rather than host it on WordPress.com.

Bluehost — Bluehost is great if you’re just starting out and need an inexpensive host. It’s easy to install WordPress on Bluehost and they have a hosting package specifically for that, though you’d be better off to go with WPEngine at that point because they have more tools for WordPress and focus solely on being the best WordPress host in the world.

WPEngine — WPEngine does WordPress hosting, so everything is optimized to make your website fast, secure, and able to handle the plugins and functionality you’ll need when WordPress is your core business engine. As a general rule, consider switching to WPEngine when you’re getting over two thousand pageviews per day or if you notice that your pages are loading slowly.

Google Analytics — Google Analytics is a free and phenomenal tool that tracks what visitors do on your website, how they get there, how long they’re there, and so on. Even if you don’t use it from the beginning, I suggest getting it started at the beginning so that you have the data when you’re ready for it. You want to make informed, smart decisions in your business and Analytics is the way to help make that happen.

Content Delivery Solutions

If you have a website, you want to get your information out to people. The single best way to do this is with email marketing. People sign up to receive information and updates from you, and these best-in-class service send those messages to them.

An elephant in the room when it comes to email marketing services is Mailchimp, largely because it has a free service for up to 2,000 subscribers. The thing, though, is that Mailchimp uses a list-based framework that makes it clunky to use once you start growing and the features you most want in your email marketing service are actually behind the paywall. 90% of people will outgrow Mailchimp unless they just want to send a newsletter every few weeks, but the last thing you’ll want to do when your business is growing fast is to switch email marketing services. I no longer recommend Mailchimp because I’ve seen people get stuck with it — better to pay $29 a month with ConvertKit and NOT get stuck and lose a lot more in the future.

ConvertKit — ConvertKit has the simplicity of Mailchimp with some of the power of more comprehensive tools. It has a visual workflow builder that’s easy to understand, has simple opt-in tools, and automation tools that help you make sure your subscribers get the content they want. While it’s true that you may outgrow ConvertKit, you won’t have to relearn a completely different way of working with your list like you would if you started with Mailchimp.

E-commerce and Online Payment Solutions

Website? Check. Content delivery service so you can market your ideas and offers? Check. Now, let’s look at how to get paid for your great work and how you pay others.

Gusto — Whether you are just hiring your first employee or have an ever-expanding team Gusto is the payroll service we recommend and use. It’s significantly cheaper and better than ADP, their customer service is fantastic, and it’s so easy to use. They take care of so many things: automatically paying employees, getting everything filed with federal, state, and local taxes, quarterly and year end reports, administering medical and other benefits, and so much more. You can manage independent contractor payments pretty easily from there, too. ICs really appreciate not having to eat fees and it’s nice not to have 8 different ways to keep up with your contractors’ invoices and payments.

Freshbooks — For service-based businesses, Freshbooks consolidates and streamlines the processes involved in getting paid, from estimating services to tracking time to creating and sending invoices to tracking the status of payments. Freshbooks also plays well with other services you use (or need to be using) such as Gusto, Google Suite, Zapier, and Asana just to name a few.

Zoho — While we still highly recommend Freshbooks and think it’s a great solution for many businesses we actually moved over to Zoho for invoicing in late 2016. Freshbooks made some changes to their services that no longer allowed us to have auto-payments run through Paypal’s gateway and since we have intentionally streamlined our business such that all online purchases go through Payal we needed to move. Zoho has much of the same ease as using Freshbooks and also plays well with other services, including Paypal, which was a clencher for us.

PayPal — Yes, it truly is the easiest way to get paid online. If you’re selling a service, it’s quite sufficient for the early stages. Selling products is a little trickier because you have to make sure people get what they buy, but the challenge is not insurmountable. After doing some research on total merchant fees, we found PayPal to be the least expensive option and we now use PayPal Website Payments Pro to take credit cards as well.

DPD (Digital Product Delivery) — This is what you want to use for secure and reliable delivery of all your digital products. For as low $10 per month, DPD is a fantastic cart, edging out out-dated carts like E-junkie as well as more advanced carts like 1ShoppingCart. It plays nicely with Convertkit and Zapier, too, so you can automate a good bit of your sales process. They let you try it out free for 30 days!

Social Media Solutions

You can get by just fine with social media without the solutions below. But if you’re finding that jumping from site to site is wearing you out OR you want to set up social media marketing campaigns, you’ll definitely want to give these a try.

Buffer — Rather than making you either send updates in real time or specify exactly when an update needs to go out, Buffer allows you to set up time slots to fill. That way, as you’re reading or sharing stuff on social media, you can space it out over time effectively; it helps avoid the “30 updates in 30 minutes, none for a week” phenomenon. I prefer Buffer to Hootsuite for the way we use social media here; it allows me to effectively batch my social media time without making a whole bunch of decisions about when things should go out.

MeetEdgar — MeetEdgar is a social media publishing tool that stores your social media updates as a library and reshuffles and reruns that content. It takes a few hours a week to seed it with content for the first few weeks, but, after that, you never have to worry about not having great content being published to your social media channels. The upside is that it incentivizes creating great content because it can be used for great effect over and over again.

Customer Relationship Management Solutions

If you’re using your address book as a way of keeping up with your contacts, you’re doing it the hard way. How do you tell who’s a customer or a prospect? How do you know what stage of the pipeline they are in? When you go to D.C., whom should you meet with? How do you collaborate with teammates? A Customer Relationship Management solution will help you answer those questions.

Highrise — I’ve tried a lot of CRMs and come back to Highrise for its simplicity, in both its use and its appearance. The can’t-live-without feature is being able to get a daily email about contacts with a certain tag (prospects, clients) to see any and all interactions my team has had with them. This feature prevents the “are we talking to our prospects and clients?” worry. If you have a sales-oriented organization that needs a pipeline, Highrise won’t be the business solution for you because its pipeline stinks – Nutshell is going to be your jam on that front.

Nutshell — Before we started using Nutshell, we had a hodgepodge of communication processes and spreadsheets that created a lot of work and left a lot of gaps. In just a week of using Nutshell, we had a central place that told us who our leads were, where they were in the pipeline, and what we needed to do to keep the sales conversations moving. Nutshell lets you create multiple pipelines, so if you have different steps for different kinds of leads like we do you can create a pipeline that works best for that service or offer. A killer feature is that it syncs with Gmail directly in near-real time, which means that we can see lead responds without asking the salesperson. The result: we’re meeting sales quotas and know what we need to do months out to make sure we’re meeting those quotes. We <3 this so hard!

Online Communication Solution

Trusted Service Providers for Growing Businesses

As great as technology is, at a certain point, you’ll need some great humans to power those tools and do the work that only people can do. Hiring people can be a bear and nearly every small business I’ve run across needs more help. Whether you are looking for the best freelancer for a certain key area of your business and don’t have the time to find them on your own, need help with spiffing up your copy, or need an overhaul of your website we’ve teamed up with some fantastic service providers to get you taken care of.

ResultsResourcing — ResultsResourcing helps you hire vetted independent contractors in a few easy steps. They help you define your job requirements and then tap into their curated talent pool to find the best match for you. You compare the recommended profiles and proposals on a virtual silver platter, select your freelancer, and start moving your business forward. Results Resourcing saves a lot of time and headaches, and to save you some money, we’ve partnered with them to save you an additional 10% on your first talent search. (Use the code CHARLIE in the cart.)

SnapCopy — SnapCopy is an on-demand copywriting service that uses an easy-to-understand credit system that helps you best determine how to work with them. They’re our go-to resource when we’re launching new projects or need some fresh eyes on what we’re currently doing. I’ve partnered with them to co-create an exclusive offer for the PF audience. They’ll optimize your opt-in copy at no charge if you use this link and use “charlie” in the checkout. We think after you give them a try you’ll be hooked like we are.

brandiD —brandiD specializes in personal branding, marketing strategy, online identity, and custom web design and development -- we like to think of them as a one-stop web marketing shop for thought leaders. They’ve been instrumental in helping us migrate to two different hosts over the years and keeping PF tip-top.