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From my experience of launching a business whilst on maternity leave, working from home for three years now and Lucy 120 miles away. We use technology and a lot of free or cheap applications to make life easier. So here are our top ten tech apps, some you will know of but there may be some new gems in there for you to look into.
1. Google Apps for business
There are a few other cloud storage options such as Dropbox, but for me as I use Google for my business email it made sense for me to go with one provider for what I needed. Google Drive is free for up to 30GB of storage which is a free limit shared across both your Google Drive and Gmail accounts but it's only a tiny monthly fee of $1.99 to increase this to 100GB.
I also have Google Drive installed on my desktop so I save everything directly into it as if it were a desktop folder. These folders and documents can be opened directly from my desktop or accessed anywhere from a web browser on any device.
I pay £3.30 per user per month which I used for my company email addresses.
Pretty cheap if you ask me and it is accessed via Gmail, so it is a familiar set up. You get all you would expect from a business email account – categories, folders, forwarding, out of office, email signatures and it can be accessed anywhere on any device. Of course you can also set it up as a mailbox on your smart phone for easy access out and about.
I have used and tested various CRM (Customer Relationship Management) cloud tools such as Insightly and Hubspot which are both free, but one I discovered recently is Pipedrive and I must say it is doing me very well so far.
This is very much sales focused though, so it you create organisations and contacts, you can do the usual like keeping notes, setting tasks and remidners etc. But the big thing about this is it’s all about the deals and the sales pipeline. So you set a deal, set them at various stages and you can clearly see your deals on the dashboard to keep on top of them and keep moving them up the pipeline.
You can have a 30 day trial for free but after that is is payable at $10 + VAT per month. If you want to integrate your emails that’s extra at $21 + Vat per month. But worth checking out, you will know after the trial if it works for you or not. If you follow this link, you will get a 60 day trial as I am a user already https://pipedrive.com/tafe/mumsenterpriseltd
3. Mailchimp
This is quite a popular choice for an email marketing tool. It is free to use for up to 2000 contacts in your lists and you can pay-as-you-go when adding further contacts which would take your total contacts over 2000. The bad news is that is you go over 2000 contacts then they charge you from 0 and it can be quite expensive, as in $100 for 5000 credits or a monthly cost of $55 for 5001 - 5200 contacts.
The functionality is easy to use and is a basic drag and drop to help you customise your email templates. I know it does have marketing automation and many other tricks it can do but I just use the basics.
4. ASANA
So again I have tested a few different project management tools such as Trello and Basecamp but you can’t beat Asana. Plus you can drill down even further, what I mean by that is you set a project, set tasks, then set further to-do’s for those tasks and then even further to-do’s for those to-do’s. Does that make sense, because a task can be a mini project in itself. The best thing about this is it’s totally FREE. Amazing I don’t know how they do it.
You can add team members to projects or just ot certain tasks or elements. You can of course set tasks for one another, leave comments and chat, set dates and more. You also have an ‘inbox’ so you can see all your tasks coming up or overdue at a glance. Upload and share documents. It really is awesome and would highly recommend it.
5. Webflow
I have only ever used Weblfow for my websites. I just love the modern style, feel and back-end which is simply drag and drop. I am no code master so it was important for me to make my own edits, amends, add text, upload images and do whatever needed to be done.
Webflow is the host for the Mums Enterprise website and again we have been very happy with it. They are fully responsive so work across all devices, are easy to use so long as you have some basic understanding of CMS or have an idea of how these tools work. If you have little to no experience there are plenty of tutorials you can do and it’s pretty easy once you know how.
However I must admit I have used the support of a web designer. Yes I can edit text, some formatting and make changes and updates but I have no clue how to add effects. We are just about to have our whole site re-done and this will cost £600 from a designer who has helped me on these webflow websites for three years now. And he is building a brand new site from scratch. We do provide him with a plan and wireframe, all the artwork and images he needs and all copy etc. But he builds the site and then we can update it and edit it ourselves. There is an active community of designers so plenty who you can go to for help.
As a cheaper option you can buy a template for £30 or £50 and simply go in the back-end and edit it with your copy and images. You can embed plenty of widgets, set pop ups, embed whatever code you like, show videos and images – everything you would want to do really so worth a look as an alternative to Wix or Wordpress etc.
Now this is a good one! For only £9.50 a month I pay to have an account with Adobe document cloud. This for me is very important as we send a lot of booking forms out for Mums Enterprise. Gone are the days of posting, scanning and why take photo’s of signed documents when you can simply upload the documents for signing and send direct to your clients for digital signatures. Easy as pie and I find the contracts are often signed much more quickly.
This is the tool which was once named Ecohsign.
7. Skype
Although it needs no introduction I am finding I am using skype so much more than ever. Lucy Chaplin my business partner is based from home in Staffordshire and I work from home in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire so we use it all the time. It also saves time travelling to meetings as you can just arrange skype calls with potential new clients or suppliers instead.
8. Tweet Jukebox / Social Jukebox
I used to use Hootsuite to manage our Social Media accounts but as we use Twitter quite a lot I have found Social Jukebox to meet what we need.
You basically upload your tweets as you like them, and then the jukebox spits them out for you so you don’t need to be live posting all the time, and it repeats so whatever is in your jukebox gets used. You can link various accounts but we use it mainly for Twitter.
Accounting is something I find quite difficult. Numbers are like puzzles to me and it has taken me a good while to get to grips with what is essential when running and managing a business. What made it easier for me is when I started to use Xero. I only pay £12.99 a month but there is a free trial again so you can decide if it’s for you.
The main thing for me is the dashboard and usability. As I said I find accounting and book-keeping confusing anyway so having a simple, clear and easy to use system is key so what I am doing doesn’t get all mixed up in my mind when using it (Honestly sure I have dyscalculia!).
I have linked our business bank account, can easily reconcile payments and money in, invoice and email clients direct, set reminders and basically have access to everything I need to keep on top of the business finances.
Being a small business we must be every department and that is hard, so it’s nice when something makes something I find tricky much easier and nicer to do.
Canva. This is a fantastic web tool which allows you to create images to standard social media templates or a custom size of your choice. I am very lucky as my business partner Lucy is a graphic designer that is what she does, so she manages our brand and design. But at times I have needed to do the odd images here and there and this free online tool has been great. It has custom template for any social media image you would want to create, it has template and grids, you can create all sorts of images. Deffo one to look at if you are struggling with creating images for your social media posts.
So there you have
it just some tools which are helping us with our flexible business approach
whilst keeping costs to a minimum.
If you have any others make a comment and let us know! :-) Remember you can always contact me about anything on Lindsey@mumsenterprise.events. xxx
