The Fierce Business Babe Podcast Ep 319: My Tip 2024 Business Tools

Today, I am diving into all things business tool related. I chat about what using the right software in your business can do, important tools you should be using to make your life easier, tools I use in my business, and so much more.

MY TOP 2024 BUSINESS TOOLS 

BY: MELISSA LIN

Welcome back to another episode of The Fierce Business Babe Podcast. I hope that everybody is having an amazing holiday season so far. I'm really excited for this episode because this is something that I get asked about very frequently on social media. Anytime I share behind the scenes of my team and I getting something prepped, for example: my content systems, our sales systems and things like that, anytime I share any of the tools that we use my DM's absolutely blow up with questions of what we use and why we use things. And so I wanted to create this episode to help really show you all of the tools that we use and give you some ideas as well on what tools you could add into your business, or maybe when the right time to add some of these tools into your business could be to really help things flow easier for you and for you to really work smarter in your business, and let these tools do that for you, instead of working harder in your business. So we're going to get into some juicy stuff today and I cannot wait. We're going to get into the importance of softwares, tools, and systems in your business. We're going to get into some of my favorite tools I use, and we're also going to get into when to scale your systems and what that looks like when you need some of these tools, and so much more!

THE IMPORTANCE OF SOFTWARES

Now, the first thing I want to get into is just the importance of softwares and why some of these systems are so critical for your business. So, before I was using any softwares, or any automation, before I had really any systems in my business, which was a few years ago. And I can remember when I first started my business back in 2014 I was doing almost everything by hand, literally doing everything by hand. And looking back it's just so cool to see how far the business has come. It's so cool to see how far the back end of the business has come as well. I want to share an example with you, and you're going to absolutely just giggle when you hear this, and I giggle when I look back at it now, but I'm going to share this story with you because maybe you can relate and we all start somewhere. So, when I first started, I remember what I made my very first freebie, my very first lead magnet. It was a download, a pdf download, and when I first created it I grabbed email addresses by hand and I would send out every single PDF by hand. So not like physically, postage stamped and in an envelope, but I would go to my email and put in the email address and send every single document one by one and none of it was automated on the backend. And if this is something you're doing right now, it's okay. I did it too when I first started, and it gets easier, it doesn't mean to all be hand done like that. 

I actually teach all of my clients how to do this specifically, and so much more than that, in our programs because I don't want you to be spending your time doing some of those tasks by hand that can very easily be automated through an email service or through an automation and some other software that you may be using in your business. What's really important is the softwares, these systems, these tools, automation, all of these things help provide you the structure in your business so that you really can be everywhere else in your business. Without these things in place in my business I wouldn't be able to spend the majority of my day doing the things that I love doing. I wouldn't be able to focus solely on supporting my clients and creating content, and those are two of the biggest things that I spend my week on because I have so much structure from these systems and these tools that I've added over the years. A few weeks back I was posting quite a bit, and I still do this, you’ll probably roll your eyes like, “Melissa, you do this every day still,” but I love just spending my afternoon with Pearl and cuddling up with her and doing things outside of my business too because my business does not take up my entire day because that's not how I want it to be, and it doesn't need to be. Your business gets to run exactly how you want it to. And because of all of these tools that I use, I'm able to continue to scale and grow my business month after month, year after year, without adding more hours. I work 20 hours a week max and we're still able to grow and to support my clients.  You can definitely do so, but it's all about working smarter, not necessarily harder. Because of those tools I’ve created this business where I'm not burnt out. I have repeatable and sustainable tools and systems in my business to help me with lead generation, to help me with sales, to help me with client onboarding, to help with standard operating procedures that can support my team. I have a scalable product suite. I have incredibly organized content, and so much more. The structure of these tools that I’ve created my business with allow me to lean back and really stay in my feminine so that I can focus on the things that are in my zone of genius and that make me feel good all of the time. And so it's really, really important to add some of these into your business as well. 

MY FAVORITE BUSINESS TOOLS

So now I want to share some of my favorite tools that I use in my business to help give you an idea of maybe some other tools you may want to check out or something else you maybe want added into your business that you haven't thought about before. I can tell you that I have tested nearly every tool out there, and I'm not kidding when I say that. I love testing new things out and I would say that I'm a teeny bit of a tech nerd and I just love to try different tools, new gadgets, things that could help make things easier for me and support me, 100% I’m always in for. I automate as much of my business as possible so that I can spend more time in my zone of genius, as I mentioned before, doing what I truly love. To cut your work time you get to be more organized, and to be more organized and more productive you can add some tools into your business. 

I want to share some of my favorite tools that I use, and we'll go ahead and start with social media. I know everybody wants to figure out how we can make social media easier for us and how we can really work smarter with this. One of our tools that we use is a tool called Later, and I love this tool because it makes it very easy to pre-schedule content and easy for my team to go in and support me. And I would definitely recommend some type of tool to support you in social media no matter how far into your business you are. It can be beneficial for solopreneurs if you're by yourself just starting, and for bigger teams. So definitely something to support you with your scheduling of social media and then also on the backend, and we're going to get into this once I get into some project management chat and the tools that we use there. When it comes to social media you always want to organize your content somehow, and so a question I ask my clients all of the time, especially as they get started in one of my programs is, if Instagram were to shut down tomorrow, which it's not likely, however, it is possible, we just don't know, but if it were to shut down tomorrow, would you lose your content? Would you lose your captions? You probably have your photos saved somewhere, but what about your captions and your content, everything that you've spent so much energy creating. Would you lose it or do you have it safe somewhere in a notepad or a Google doc? We use Airtable for our content bank, and we share exactly how we do this with all of our clients to make it easier so that in the future, and this is what my team does, they go into our content bank and schedule things out for us. So a question I want you to really think about is, if social media were to shut down tomorrow would you lose everything that you put so much energy into? I definitely want to make sure that you save it. There's always oopsie daisies, things that happen. Tech things happen from time to time, sometimes reels disappear, captions out of nowhere disappear on social media, so we want to have a backup somewhere. I've definitely learned over the years to have a backup. 

Now the next tool I want to get into is something around my funnels, my emails, and what' some of those tools look like. One of the first questions I get from some of my Mastermind clients, and lots over on social media is, “Melissa how and what do you use for your funnels to make it look so seamless and continue to grow it?” So we use ActiveCampaign as our main email service and I highly recommend it. We transitioned to ActiveCampaign a few years ago and I highly, highly recommend it. There's a lot of email services out there that will do a very similar job, so definitely find one that you really do enjoy. Most of these have free 2-week trials, so test them out and see what works for you. ActiveCampaign just has so much inside that they can do and the integrations are just mind-blowing and the automation is just mind-blowing for what really can happen. So all of our funnels are tied to our email service and our website. Definitely find an email service that has a lot of capabilities. If you’re in the very, very beginning you don't need anything huge, just get your email list started because emails are what you own. For our funnels we do have a few evergreen tools that we use, which I can touch on a little bit later as we get into some of the higher-level content as well, but I definitely recommend that you start with some type of email service. For our funnels we use ActiveCampaign, for some of our funnels we've got some different option pages which are all on our website, and you can also create option pages through your email service. We teach our clients how they can do it on the backend, lots of backend support in all of our programs because I know for so many that can feel the hardest. So definitely have something where you can create an opt-in page, email send out, and add a volume based scale as well. 

TOOLS I USE IN MY COACHING PROGRAMS

So now let’s get into some of the tools that I use in my coaching programs. I love sharing these tools, they are some of my favorite tools. We'll chat about Course Hub and also tools that I use to record different things. So, one of my favorite tools that I use every single day in my business is either Zoom or Loom. I utilize this for coaching calls, I utilize it for team calls, and what's really cool about both is you can record and then use a download as course content if you want to. Most of the trainings that I create for my clients are either Zoom or Loom. It’s really easy to share your PowerPoint, to share your screen, record it, and then upload it into your course hub for your clients. And so when it comes to course hubs, if you've ever worked with me, at least in the past four years or so, we have been utilizing Thinkific for our course hub, which I absolutely love. It integrates wonderfully with all of the other tools that we use, so I highly recommend it. Find somewhere to house your content, somewhere that your clients can go to to watch replays of calls, or to watch content, trainings, different modules. And I will share with you when I first started in 2014 I didn't have a course hub when I first started. It’s not necessary at the very beginning. When I first started, I had a Google Drive folder where I dropped in video trainings for my clients and then I expanded into a course hub as we started to grow and support more clients because to scale you really do need some type of course hub. I would recommend playing around with it. Thinkific is my absolute favorite, there's others on the market, but this is one that I’ve just used personally for the past four years and I highly, highly recommend it. 

Another tool that we use inside of our coaching programs is Voxer. We utilize this as a communication tool with my one-on-one clients, my private clients, and with my Fiercely Scale clients, which I chatted about at the very beginning of this episode.  In this program we help our clients move from six figures and scale into multiple six-figures, and that is my only higher-level Mastermind where private access is also provided. So we do use it, it's very easy. I love it because it's just so easy to text and voice message, you can even do so from your computer. It's pretty cool. Another client communication tool that we use is Slack. We also use that for our team Slack Channel as well. It’s a very easy way to stay organized inside of your programs and also inside of your business as you start to grow your team. 

PROJECT MANAGEMENT TOOLS

So let's get into some project management because I do get a lot of questions on social media, anytime I share behind the scenes of these two tools. So we use two main tools, and in order to build a 7-figure business, you need to be organized. I use both Asana and Airtable to organize my business projects, systems, strategies, my launches, and so much more. We use Asana more for task management and team management and high-level projects, whereas Airtable is more so for hosting and banking items, such as our content bank, our content schedule, our branding assets, and so much more. So two tools I definitely recommend taking a look at. We have really made upgrades to both of these in the backend so that they really support our team and really support the business, so I highly recommend them. And yes, we have so many different Asana templates and Airtable templates that we have created for our clients that they receive in our programs too. 

So I talked a little bit about Slack and I want to get into a few things about teams. So if you are scaling to six figures in your business, huge congrats, so excited for you, you're most likely moving away from being a solo entrepreneur and you’re starting to hire your first few team members. So, as you start to hire team members, I do recommend some type of communication tool. That could be Voxer, it could be Slack, I would definitely recommend Slack because it is more organized, there’s more capabilities with Slack vs. Voxer in terms of bigger teams and communication. And then the other thing I recommend is LastPass. I know there's a few other tools out there that are very similar, but we use LastPass and I love it. We’ve been using it for quite a few years. If you want to share passwords anytime you bring a team member on, LastPass is a great tool because you can share passwords with team members without actually showing them the password, it just integrates into the computer. There is integration that you can add on to your desktop and integration you can add into the actual browser, it is an amazing tool for you and your team. Honestly, I started using LastPass before I even had a team just so I could have all of my passwords safely secured somewhere without me trying to remember all of them because we do use quite a few different tools and softwares and usernames and passwords and I wanted to make sure we don't lose any of them. So, definitely one I would recommend. 

We already chatted about Voxer, but there is one other thing I wanted to say about Voxer. I shared a few tools over on my Instagram stories and somebody asked me why I use Voxer versus WhatsApp or or just normal texting, and something that I have done very well over the last few years in my business is creating some strong boundaries between clients and myself so I can really have strong personal and business boundaries. I love Voxer because you don't need to share your personal cell phone number with clients, whereas with something like WhatsApp or normal texting you do. 

BONUS TOOLS FOR YOUR BUSINESS

So far we've got into some social media tools, different tools that we use for funnels, coaching programs, communication tools, project management, team tools, and I want to share a few bonus tools as well. One other tool that I use every single day is Google Calendar, and this calendar truly runs my life. Every detail of my day goes here. It keeps me on task throughout the day as well. My girlfriends even know if our happy hour isn't on my Google Calendar it's not happening. Google Calendar is so wonderful and there are just so many cool things you can do. We use another tool in our coaching programs to share the group coaching call calendars to our client’s calendars, they can also add them in. Google Calendar is just so, so, so cool, there are tons of cool things you can do. And then another one that I love is Google Drive. I utilize Google Drive for my private clients and then Fiercely Scale clients as well. Both parties can upload documents, give feedback, it’s a very simple way to create onboarding folders for your clients and save you time from recreating new material constantly. Another one that is really, really helpful for any kind of social media, or any kind of content creation really, is Canva. This is the easiest way to create graphics for your business. The possibilities are just so endless. I have had so much fun on Canva. I've uploaded all my colors, my fonts, and things like that to really make easy graphics, and now my team can go in and make easy graphics for us with just the click of a button, so cool. 

And the last tool that I do want to share with you is one of my favorite payment processors that we use, and it's called Thrivecart. And this is something that links through Stripe to receive payment from clients. If you’ve worked with us, you most likely went through this check out system and I absolutely love it. They're always making updates to the backend and it really creates a seamless experience for the client, which is always a big goal of mine. I want to make it as easy as possible for our clients and really continue to improve client experience always. There’s always more opportunity to do so. Thrivecart has made it so easy for us to automate that onboarding system that we have, same thing with the offboarding system as well. It’s definitely one I'd recommend. I know there's others out there, Thrivecart is the one that I've used and I absolutely love it and we’ve been with them and will be with them for quite some time. 

WHEN TO SCALE 

So now after going through some examples of tools that I use in my business I want to chat about when to actually scale some of these tools and when is it that you actually need some of these tools? So if you are in the very beginning stages and you're just starting your business, first, huge congrats, I’m so excited for you to get started, second, you probably don't need the same systems that I have or the same tools that I just shared with you. Your starting software and tools do not need to look like a 7-figure business’ software and tools, and technically the system upgrades that we made on the backend in the last year can also support a multiple 7-figure business. And personally, I'm always working one to two steps ahead, so when we hit multiple seven figures we will be working on upgrading our systems to handle eight figures. So, for example, in my Six-Figure Mastermind we help our clients scale their businesses to 10K months and we support and teach both the front-end and back-end of what's needed and how to get there. We support you every step of the way and we also prep our clients for multiple six figures so that they can continue on and can handle their businesses, both front-end and back-end. We start to get that going for them too so they can be ready once they hit it, we're always prepping ahead. We make sure to support our clients so they can start prepping ahead too. 

So what do you need now and what do you need later? If you were starting from the very beginning, you definitely need to have an email service, and again it can be free. There are a few free ones out there. Most are either completely free or have a 2-week free trial.You need some type of email service so that you aren't having to send emails one by one by hand, and a scheduling tool, and this can also be free. And most of the services, the tools that I share have a free testing version for you to try and once you're ready you can definitely upgrade. You also need some type of payment system so you can accept payments from clients. And yes, we do teach our clients how to do this in our programs. You’ll need something for client contracts, I definitely recommend a lead-generation tracker of some sort, and, hint-hint, or reminder I guess, we do have a few podcast episodes that go into different aspects of lead generation tools, and I also have an entire episode on how to really use your tool for your business, how often to be going into it, how to really organize your lead tracker, the importance of it, that sort of thing. So definitely go back and check out some of those, you'll love it. And then you also want somewhere to keep your content, right? As they mentioned, some type of bank, some type of calendar so that if something happens you won't lose all of your hard work. So there's always more, but I would say those are the basics of what you need right now when you're getting started. 

If you are heading to six figures, this is where you want to start creating and documenting some of your current systems so they can be handed off to a future team member. So, if you are doing something right now, how could this tool that you're using, or how could this process be easier for you? You're going to add in more automation so that more of your business can be hands-off. That might mean upgrading a few of the tools that you're using right now to give you more capabilities. More upgraded and the pro versions of things have more automation capabilities. I definitely recommend a strong project management tool when you're at this level. I definitely recommend it because you're most likely going to start hiring some team members and you want to make sure that you guys are staying on task with your project. And as you start scaling to multiple six figures and seven figures this is where you start making some real upgrades in the backend. Evergreen systems, your lead generations on autopilot, everything is automated in the backend, including your sales process so that things can run effectively, efficiently, and continue to grow month after month, year after year. 

I do hope that you learned about a new tool today or got some ideas of others that may be more beneficial and make more sense for you to try. So, we have touched on the importance of different tools and software for your business, my favorite tools I use, when to start to add some of these in your business, when to start to scale some of your tools, and so much more. We are already getting ready and excited for next week's brand new episode. I cannot wait to share it with you, we’ve got some amazing topics coming your way. We will see you next week in another brand new episode of the Fierce Business Babe Podcast bright and early next Monday morning. 

Topics we cover include: 

• Using the right software in your business

• My favorite business tools

• Project management tools

• Programs for your whole team to use 

   And so much more!