Maximizing Your Business Potential: Essential Tools and Strategies
- Published:
- Updated: April 12, 2024
Are you new to business and need help organizing your time and money? As a life and business coach, I want to help you with both!
In this post, you will discover 13 awesome tools that will help you start your online or brick and mortar business.
*This post may contain affiliate links to online business tools, which means I may receive a small commission, at no cost to you, if you make a purchase through a link!*
But before we dive into the best online business tools, let’s talk about your priorities.
Consider your business plan as a cornerstone in your arsenal of tools. It serves as a roadmap detailing how you envision the growth and evolution of your enterprise, including strategies for reinvesting your profits.
The Impotence of Identifying Your Priorities
Understanding your business priorities is crucial. They guide you in allocating your resources wisely—your time and money. One effective way to identify and document these priorities is through a comprehensive business plan.
Consider your business plan as a cornerstone in your arsenal of tools. It serves as a roadmap detailing how you envision the growth and evolution of your enterprise, including strategies for reinvesting your profits.
Now, if you find yourself without a business plan, don’t panic. If you do not have a business plan in place, do not stress out – get one from here.
A fundamental question your business plan should address is: “What does my business need most urgently at this moment?” This echoes the theme of my previous article, “Maximize Your Productivity,” where I emphasized the importance of distinguishing between the urgent and the important.
After you have figured out what is needed and necessary, then you can open up that pocketbook and start spending. In the next section, we will discuss tools that you will need to help grow your small business.
Why you need more than just a website
The sacrifice is well worth it. If you are serious about growing your business, you need to invest in online business tools and marketing tools that will work hard for you and your goals.
Now that we’ve cleared up that issue, let’s talk about where to use that money. These are the areas in which you should invest right now to help lay a solid foundation as your business grows.
Essential Resources for Every Business Owner: 12 Must-Haves
Below is a list of things your business will need as it grows. It is not an exhaustive list but it will help lay a good foundation. Some of these items to are free or low cost.
1. A Coach
Growing a business is not easy! It will test you to the core and make you want to give up many, many, many times. A combined business and life coach should be number one on your list. Your coach will help you avoid the pitfalls and help you from making poor business decisions. Don’t have one –let’s talk!
2. Website
Buy a website. Unlike social media, you own it and control what material comes on it.
It does not matter if your website comes from Weebly, Bluehost or Square Space. Find a provider and pay for a website. And if necessary, buy plug-ins like EWWW IO to help improve the load speed of your website.
My first website cost me $150 and it was a simple WordPress website. Remember, people want to learn more about you before they pick up a phone or send you an email address.
Your website should be clearly organized and explain these elements: what you do, how you do it, who you serve and how they should contact you.
Search engine optimizations is essential if you want people to find you online. This SEO SWAT article is a great resource to help you identify areas of improvement.
3. Course or Teaching Portal (ONLY FOR TEACHERS/COURSE CREATORS)
If you are looking for a place to share your course content, try Zenler. There are other competitors such as Thinkific or Teachable. Find a platform that works best for your needs.
4. Professional Email Address
Say goodbye to your @gmail.com or @yahoo.com address and get a real email address.
If you want people to take you seriously, this little bit of money is worth the investment. If you already have a business website, you should already have one. You can obtain a business email address from GoDaddy for as little as $2/month.
5. Customer Relations Manager (CRM)
As your business grows, so will your list of business contacts. Make sure you have a good CRM. This will be helpful because as your list of customer grows, you can easily segment them by their unique business or personal needs.
Many companies like Hubspot and Salesforce offer FREE CRMs. Zapier created a list of the best free CRMs available. Take a moment and set one up now.
6. Online Business Email Marketing Service And Tools
Talking about your CRM, you need to keep in contact with your people. Remember I mentioned that companies like Hubspot offer free their CRMs for free? They did not offer it out of the goodness of their hearts, they know you will need keep in contact with your customers via email.
If you do not want to use them you can also online business email marketing tools like Constant Contact, Awber or Mailchimp. These companies will help you to create landing pages (also known as splash or squeeze) to help generate new leads.
7. Online Scheduler
Avoid the back and forth email messaging with contacts. Get an online calendar so you can schedule meetings with people. I use Calendy but there are other service providers like Acuity.
8. Lawyer
You may not think you need a lawyer now but I promise you will need one in the future.
Legal Shield can offer you legal protection for as little as $25/month. You can also buy stand-alone contracts, terms of service agreements and other useful forms from companies like Artful Contracts.
Make your Business a LLC.
Don’t take chances from intellectual theft or any type of issue that may impact your finances. Shield yourself from liability and deduct your expenses using a LLC.
9. Virtual Assistant (VA)
Your VA will be your second eye to help manage your business. They can help you from everything from writing email messages, copywriting, email marketing, ad creation or graphics.
Contact me and I will send you a list of VAs that I recommend. If you need help with copywriting, you NEED to contact Tania Dakka. She provides entrepreneurs copywriting services at an affordable price.
10. Online or Printed Advertising
It does not matter if it is online or in print, devote at least 20% of your profits towards advertising.
Do not rely on referrals alone to help create new business. You can advertise online, in print or sending old-fashioned mailers. Whatever mode you choose, make sure you track and monitor the performance of your campaigns.
11. Marketing
People intermingle this issue with advertising. Marketing and advertising are related, but separate issues. Marketing is about understanding your customer and tailoring your products to appeal to them.
The Marketing costs include the research of your ideal customer (where they are, interests and spending habits). This includes money towards surveys or participating in focus groups studies. Make sure at least 1-5% of your business costs is devoted to marketing tools for online business.
12. Finances
Business Reimbursement
Bookkeeper
Do not lose track of your money! Manage your books using Quickbooks or hire a bookkeeper, this will help make sure every penny you earn is accounted for. Once you got that your money organized, an electronic organization system will help make sure everything else is in order.
13. Electronic Organization System
Whether you choose to use Google Drive or Evernote, find a system that will help you organize all of your files in a cloud network. I personally had too many computer issues to realize that keeping my files local was a bad idea.
There will be many other investments you will need but the items above will help you stay organized and efficient.
If you are my client, we will help you nail down on investments that make the most sense for your stage in business.
Interested in working with me? Learn more about how business and life coaching works. And listen to one of many tips via my podcast here!
