5 Must-Have Business Tools for Operations

Mar 11

5 Must-Have Business Tools for Operations

BY MICHELLE KNIGHT

This post contains affiliate links which means if you make a purchase through a link, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you!

One of the top questions that I get asked daily in my business is, "What did I use to do that? What do I use to run this? How do I do that?"

Everybody wants to know what tools I'm using, and I get it because there are a lot of options out there.

Today, I wanted to share those tools with you, but I wanted to share them with you in a way that is a little bit more streamlined, because we've all seen the blog posts that have 35 Business Tools, and we're like, "I don't even know what to do with all this information."

So, we're going to kick off a series that is going to share some of my top tools in business, but we're going to break it up into specific categories.

Today, I want to share with you five of the tools that I use in my business for operations. Think tools used for the day-to-day, working with my customers, handling payments, tasks inside of my business.

And before we get into it you should know I’ve tried so many tools in my business, like way too many to count. So, I’m hoping my need for in-depth research helps you streamline your process a bit and saves you valuable time.

So let's get into it.

MUST-HAVE BUSINESS TOOL #1: Kajabi

Now, tool number one should not come as a surprise to many of you if you have read some of my previous blogs.

The top tool I recommend tends to be Kajabi. You might know that I have a membership site called Brandmerry Academy. I also have a course that I've been selling for almost two years now called You! Branded. I also have group programs, special bonuses and deliver free content to my community and all of it is housed inside of Kajabi.

I love Kajabi because it truly is an all-in-one platform that was designed for course creators, but as you can tell, allows for a lot of different things.

Kajabi can have your website and your blog, to handle your checkout pages, your sales pages, to upload your course content, to email your subscribers, to email your clients, to have landing pages. There are so many options inside of Kajabi.

Over here at Brandmerry, we specifically use it for paying clients.

For my program Brandmerry Academy, or You! Branded, my clients will check out on Kajabi, they'll get access to the membership site in Kajabi, they will get emails from me and updates from me all inside of Kajabi.

It makes my life easier as an all-in-one platform to onboard and update my existing clients from one simple platform.

In the next few posts, I’m going to share more about how I use Kajabi specifically to host my courses and scale my revenue.

If you want to try Kajabi and give it a spin, you can go to brandmerry.com/kajabi for a 14-day trial and to check it out, see if you like it for yourself.

One of the goals as a business owner is to have recurring clients, and so many of my clients will go from You! Branded into the Academy and then maybe work with me inside of Roadmap to Freedom.

So they get to keep all of their awesome materials in one location, and it makes it a valuable and organized membership portal for Brandmerry clients, which I love.

So tool #1 is Kajabi and it’s what we use over here for housing all of our membership and paid content, and communicating with our paying clients.

MUST-HAVE BUSINESS TOLL #2: HoneyBook

The second tool that I love to use in my business is called HoneyBook.

While Kajabi is what I love to use for my clients inside of my courses, membership and group programs, I love to use HoneyBook to use with my private clients.

There are a lot of different ways that you can use HoneyBook in business. Many of my clients are photographers and/ or graphic designers and love HoneyBook because when they’re working with a 1:1 client and there is a lot of back and forth.

First, you’ve got the contract, then invoices, email communication, maybe proposals, proofs, etc and you want a way to keep that in one place for the client.

This is what HoneyBook provides.

At Brandmerry we use HoneyBook to create automated workflows and templates to streamline the entire onboarding process for my high-level one-on-one clients.

These clients start with applying for a one-on-one coaching spot, which is a form that we embed from Honeybook.

Then we have email correspondence back and forth to answer any questions about the timeline, support and pricing. All of this is housed in HoneyBook and can be easily read and responded to there, but also connects directly to my Gmail as well.

Then the potential client moves to paying the invoice, receiving and signing their contract and making sure additional onboarding emails for their folder, scheduling their calls, etc are all handled within HoneyBook.

We saved all those emails as templates inside of HoneyBook, which helps us automate so much of that process and also saves us tons of time. I also love how it tracks where someone might be inside of the onboarding process so we can check in with anyone who might not have responded or whose contract is up for renewal.

Also, many of my clients love the segmenting options HoneyBook provides.

For instance, let’s say you are a photographer and you have an inquiry form on your website. Someone can check different boxes, based on what they're interested in (i.e. wedding, engagement, newborn, etc…), and then go into different workflows with templated emails.

If you want to test drive HoneyBook you can use my link for a special discount and trial, depending on the package you choose.

MUST-HAVE BUSINESS TOOL #3: Squarespace

One of the top questions I get is “Where is your website, Michelle?”

And you might have just guessed it but my website is on Squarespace.

So as I mentioned before, you can have your website on Kajabi, but in the beginning, I wasn’t so savvy and tried to piece everything together.

So my website's been on Squarespace since day one and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I absolutely love Squarespace because it allows me to customize and design things without having all of the tech knowledge.

Over the years I’ve taught myself how to code and make modifications because I had a little bit of that past knowledge in my toolbox, but many of my clients don't have that, and they're not really keen on designing everything themselves, so Squarespace makes it super easy.

In addition to the ease of designing your website in Squarespace, I’m also a big fan of their Analytics and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Inside Squarespace, you have all of your analytics so that you can see your numbers. You can see what pages people are viewing, you can see where people are coming from, and you are set up for strong SEO on the platform as well.

You might know that I teach Search Engine Optimization inside of the Academy, and that's because I have used SEO to rank my website on page one for multiple keywords, if not the first spot on page one.

That's all done in Squarespace.
Many people think you need WordPress to do it and that’s just not true.

It's super easy to make sure that your page title and your page description, your keywords, and your alt text is all set up to support you in doing just that.

Squarespace is one of my favorite websites to recommend to my clients, so if you're just starting out and you're not necessarily ready to host courses and things like that, and you don't want to invest in Kajabi out of the gate, then Squarespace is a great option to start out.

Or if you're like me and you just want to pay for the best of the best, you just keep both of them because it's just easier that way.

I think one of my favorite things that I learned about Squarespace early on is that I didn't have to pay somebody to make updates to my website. I could do it myself. And there's something really empowering about doing that as a business owner, especially when you're starting out.

MUST-HAVE BUSINESS TOOL #4: Acuity Scheduling

There is a lot of scheduling that happens over here at Brandmerry.

We've got client scheduling, bonus sessions, all kinds of different things that need to work with my personal schedule, so having a central scheduling platform is amazing.

At Brandmerry, we use Acuity Scheduling, and one of the reasons that I love Acuity is because it allows me to set up tons of automation on the backend.

You guys are probably picking up on this, but I love a good automation.

It’s important to have automations in place to stay in contact with people who have booked with you and make sure that your time slot is on their calendar and they've got the information that they need for your call. So I love that Acuity allows me to set email templates to send important links for our Zoom room, to link a form that I want them to fill out before their session, or even send post-session automations as well.

I can send it all through Acuity to make sure my clients have everything they need.

Inside Acuity, you also can set your availability. So if someone goes to schedule a call, they aren't accidentally going to book on a day that I'm hanging out with my kiddo or I'm running errands or just want to take the day off.

Having a scheduler set up is essential if you want to have clear time boundaries in your business.

And some additional perks of Acuity are that you can collect payments and have submission forms and questionnaires.

So, for scheduling over here, we love Acuity.

MUST-HAVE BUSINESS TOOL #5: Zoom

That leads us to tool number five.

I feel like everyone, and their mom, and their grandma, knows this platform now because of 2020…
...and that's Zoom.

I've been using Zoom since the very beginning of my business, back in 2016 and have used it for my coaching calls, workshops, webinars, recording podcasts and more.

While I have a feeling you might already be using this platform, if you’re not and you’re having conversations with people, coaching calls, hosting webinars and want to record the thing then Zoom is a great choice.

CONCLUSION

So there you have it.

Those are the five tools that I love to use in my business that help with Operations. Go ahead and try some of them out, many of the links above offer discounts or free trials because they are affiliate links.

Hopefully, this helps you make some decisions and get started with streamlining and automating the operations side of your business.

Stay tuned for future posts on the series around productivity and marketing tools.

Branding and Business Coach | Michelle Knight of Brandmerry

Watch the full video below!

P.S. Have you tuned in to The Beautiful Climb podcast? I release new episodes every other Friday on topics around productivity, motherhood, habits, goals and going after the life of your dreams! Check out past episodes and be sure to subscribe at thebeautifulclimb.com