5 Services Every Small Business Owner Should Know About

Sometimes I like to think of myself as your big sister in the world of small business. When I was just starting out I wish I had someone to ask simple business questions of without feeling dumb and without having to google things for 15 hours a day.

With this in mind, I’d like to share 5 services I think will benefit your small business, especially if you’re just starting out but even if you’ve been around a few years. These services will help you take your brand from amateur to professional, elevating you to a new level of organization, look, and feel.

Dubsado

First on my list of business-changing platforms is Dubsado. Dubsado is a client relationship manager or CRM. It helps you organize your clients and jobs, send professional contracts, proposals, invoices, and so much more! It’s basically your business dashboard that helps you not lose track of anything and makes you look super legit.

Flodesk

An e-mail list is one of the best ways to grow a business. My favorite platform for building an email list is Flodesk. They make it super easy, and beautiful too! With Flodesk, you can create a clean and professional landing page to ask for email sign-ups even before you build a website. I have found it incredibly easy to create beautiful, clean, on-brand email campaigns through Flodesk too.

Squarespace

When you’re ready to get that full website built, I highly recommend using Squarespace to do it. I’ve used Squarespace almost the entire time I’ve been in business and they make building a website intuitive and simple for someone who has never done it before with drag-and-drop features. With ready-made templates at no extra charge, they are a really affordable and beautiful platform to take your website up a notch too. Of course, if you’re ready to pay someone to design something unique for you, they can build it on this platform too, so that it’s easily modifiable by you if needed.

Planoly

Another service platform that I recommend every small business owner to use, is Planoly. Planoly is a platform for planning your social media marketing in advance and tracking your analytics. You can connect it to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and even Pinterest! The basic level is free and a great way for you to stay on top of your social media marketing by batching out posts and pins to go live automatically so that you don’t constantly have to be checking in and posting in the moment. Batching out your posts in advance also helps to create a cohesive look on your social media and a smart strategy for sharing content.

Quickbooks

The last service that I want to share with you today is QuickBooks. Though bookkeeping is not my favorite thing to talk about, it’s such an important part of managing your small business. QuickBooks is the simplest tool I’ve found for managing my books, while still making my tax accountant happy at the end of the year. I use it to track my expenses and categorize them for end-of-year tax purposes. It automatically suggests a category and I just have to click a button to approve it. I also use the app on my phone to snap receipts for my records. And it automatically tracks my miles when I drive to appointments and shoots. It puts all this info into fancy reports to check up on how my business is doing financially and makes it easy to hand things off to my accountant during tax season, which is my favorite part about it since I am the worst at actually doing the money stuff ;)

Looking for further recommendations of tools I use in my business? I’d be happy to answer your questions! Please don’t hesitate to contact me here or continue to browse the blog! You can also sign up to get tips like this in your inbox every week here!