5 tools to get your new business started
Starting a new business is exciting but along with the excitement comes some admin as you get everything in order. While tools aren’t absolutely necessary, they can help to optimise your time, allowing you to focus your effort where it’s most needed.
At Juniper, we’ve both been fortunate to work with a wide variety of tools all designed to support a business with different needs. This meant that it was fairly easy for us to choose the ones which we knew would suit us best while we get things off the ground. That’s not to say we got it right first time though! There was definitely a little experimentation in the first few weeks of Juniper and so we thought we’d take the opportunity to share with you the tools we use daily to keep on top of things.
Trello
Trello is a well known online visual task management tool, widely used for all manner of projects and a firm favourite for us at Juniper. It’s hugely flexible and can be used for pretty much any kind of to do list, whether that’s a complex technical project with multiple team members or a simple personal task list (by the way, it’s also FREE!).
We’ve utilised Trello for a number of things:
Our general business to-do’s
We hold a shared list of tasks and on a weekly basis, review our goals for the coming week. We don’t tend to allocate jobs, we just have an unwritten rule that if you pick a task up you allocate it to yourself in Trello and move it to ‘In progress’. By moving the tasks we need to achieve our goals into a ‘Weeks priorities’ list it makes it easy for us to keep focussed and make sure that we don’t miss anything important.
Sales pipeline
We looked at multiple options for managing our sales pipeline, however in the end we settled on keeping it simple. We use a kanban style board in Trello to monitor the progress of our sales pipeline, allocate ownership of a lead and we also use tags to categorise the services that a particular lead is interested in for ease.
Social media calendar
We were in the midst of looking at options for better managing our social media calendar when we by chance came across a really good template in Trello. We’re only in the first month of trying Trello out as the tool for managing this but so far so good! A column for each month and a preset template for cards makes it really easy for us to plan a few months ahead.
Client projects
Where our clients would like a little more organisation and/or easy visibility of project progress, we’re sharing a Trello board with them. This makes it really simple to allocate tasks between the two parties and also means that we all have a fully up to date overview at any time of project progress.
Canva
Canva is our absolute go to for creating custom imagery. Whether it’s to develop bespoke iconography for a client website or put together an animated social media image it’s a powerful tool. It’s also well worth while investing in the paid for tier of Canva to get access to a larger library of graphics, photography and tools.
You don’t have to be a designer to use Canva, if you’re not confident with putting together your own artwork, it has a huge library of preset templates to choose from and make your own.
If you are using Canva, please ensure that you properly read the licensing terms.
Crunch Free
Crunch Accounting released a free tier of their accounting platform last year. For the first month or two, we were managing our book keeping in a spreadsheet but moving over to using Crunch Free has made keeping on top of our bank account and invoicing so much easier. It’s worth taking the time to find a good book keeping solution which works for you, there are plenty of paid options out there but if you’re looking to just get started, Crunch Free does everything you need.
Facebook Business Suite
There are so many tools out there for managing your social media but if you’re just wanting to start simple, Facebook Business Suite is a pretty handy one to use. From the Business Suite, you can post out to both Facebook and Instagram, schedule posts if you’re not going to be around when you want them to go out and see some basic level stats on how they’re performing.
The limitation here is that the Business Suite only covers Facebook and Instagram, so if you’re using other platforms (e.g. LinkedIn) you’d need to go and post separately to those.
GSuite
This one you’re probably aware of, however a lot of people don’t use the full GSuite, they tend to sign up to GMail and it ends there. There are lots of tools which come alongside GMail which are well worth looking into, in particular if you’re looking to save purchasing an MS Office license!
Whether it’s Google Sheets, Google Docs or just storing documents in Google Drive - keeping everything in our GSuite means that we can collaborate in real time on all of our documentation. We also use it as our central storage for everything, removing the risk that one of our machines dies or gets stolen one day and we lose a load of important documents that were stored on the local drive.
So there you go! Our top five tools for quickly and cost effectively kicking off your new business based on what we’ve found most useful while getting Juniper up and running in the past year. Do you think we’re missing out on something really worthwhile? Please let us know, we’d love to hear your thoughts!
