As a successful, hard-working entrepreneur, you’re tasked every day with making smart decisions that pay off and get the job done.

In order to this, we know that using the best business tools can skyrocket your productivity, save you time, money, and help avoid hassles and headaches down the road.

For those still building your business your prime issues are focused on earning enough, maintaining the unique knowledge and skills in your industry, giving top level service while attracting the best clients for your business, and finding more free time through efficiency.

That’s why we’ve put together this list of our favorite resources that will help you grow your business. YES, AI IS INCLUDED at the bottom:

CUT TO THE CHASE, GET ANSWERS

  Creating Breakthroughs. You will not find this marketing tool anywhere else!  ‘‘Walks With Bliss: Idea Lab”: Innovative business breakthrough "Walking Consultation" sessions for groups or individuals to stimulate ideas for building revenues, to gain clarity for branding, or to foster creative solutions for operational or team issues with a calming one-hour walk along the water.

Bucolic walking environments set the stage for relaxation, stimulation of our imagination with the emergence of breakthrough direction, solutions and epiphanal results.

Visionary leaders are guided by a business and marketing consultant through a proprietary process of discovery to reach high performance mode.

BLOG & WEBSITES

Our Blog: We update our blog often with specific and useful information for entrepreneurs – from how to get more clients through “vertical marketing,” to truths and tips on using social media for swift results!  This blog has relevant and timely information at no cost to you.  If you haven’t already done so, subscribe today and start receiving tips for working smarter and boosting your income.

If you haven't added a blog to your website, let us help you with that!

Need a Website or Internet Marketing Advice? With all the ‘noise’ online, how can you be sure your website will get found?

And once people find you, will they buy from you?

These are the top concerns of every smart entrepreneur.  To ensure you have a website that gets results, we’ll either build you a fully functional and search-optimized site, or conduct an internet marketing review of your current site.  Expert advising with a sales and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) evaluation can uncover all kinds of missed opportunities, or recommend small adjustments that can dramatically impact your bottom line.

PHONE

I long ago severed the cord with Verizon’s excessive cost and useless customer service, switching to Mint Mobile’s fantastic pricing, reliability, and relatively useful website for members.

 

NOTE TAKING/TRANSCRIPTION

I rely on the Otter automatic transcription tool for note taking so I can just listen and participate in meetings instead! Not sure I like this new feature noted by one of my business resource experts, but haven’t used that yet: Otter’s new AI agent can speak up in meetings.

CRM (CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGER)

Track your sales, marketing communications, client interactions, & projects with a CRM or database so you don’t have to keep it all in your head or in a contact list where information gets lost. My favorite is Filemaker Pro by Claris, its AI powered, very intuitive and easy to learn.

Like many entrepreneurs, we’re always juggling multiple projects simultaneously, with multiple deadlines, involving multiple stakeholders who perform multiple tasks.

But rather than pulling our hair out and losing sleep, we easily keep track of all those activities using a database called Filemaker Pro by Claris. This robust program allows you to custom tailor project notes, and efficiently track your marketing campaigns and sales activities. And that makes you better at what you do.

There are many database programs to choose from, but we find Filemaker Pro to be the most intuitive and adaptable for just about any type of company.  To get you up and running quickly with it, we can even train you to use it and add custom marketing fields, too.

Zoho is also a decent system; affordable and scalable. Salesforce is useful for much larger companies or scalable projects but is also more costly and complex to learn.

Want other ideas for online databases? Take a look at the resources at the bottom of our "Store" page.

PAYMENT PLATFORMS

Zelle is my current preferred way to pay my teams. They get the funds immediately and I pay no fee. You have to use a bank that is set up for Zelle.

Venmo is my favorite way to pay for personal expenses. It's immediate transfer of funds which can be set up at no charge, or use the business version with a small fee.

Cash App is  a great tool for making online payments that (so far) don’t cost sender or receiver any fees (at the time of this posting, check for updates!).  

It beats Paypal because there is no 3 day hold on money, so payments to my vendors drops immediately into their bank account!

EMAIL PROGRAMS

Vertical Response or MailChimp are programs for sending emails to large groups. Many newer businesses still don’t know that your emails will end up in sp*m filters if sent to a large group, so these programs are the answer. Constant Contact is fairly easy to learn & has useful features, but more costly that the others.

Sending Emails to a Large List? You cannot send emails to hundreds of people through Outlook or your standard email because the messages will be tagged as ‘sp^m’ .  Vertical Response (classic version)  is a low-cost, pay-as-you-go program that allows you to send large quantities of email without getting tagged as a sp^mmer and it's reasonably low cost. Now that’s leverage! You'll get reports on the crucial aspects of email marketing: delivery rate, open rate, click-through rate, & unsubscribers. This valuable data helps you improve your email marketing in the short and long term.

SCHEDULING

Doodle & Calendly are both useful tools. Calendly allows you to schedule with multiple people without having to weed through dozens of emails to coordinate. So easy to use. Creates a form allowing invitees to schedule online, privately. Saves time! are both useful for scheduling. It saves those dozen emails back and forth trying to pick dates and times to meet. Once you create the services and times you offer, it creates automatic appointments and meeting schedules and even sends reminder notices to you and the person scheduling.

  Doodle allows you to schedule with multiple people without having to weed through dozens of emails to coordinate. So easy to use. Creates a form allowing invitees to schedule online, privately. Saves time!

ACCOUNTING

I’ve been a longtime Quickbooks [desktop] user for accounting, but when they raised the renewal price 800%,  I switched to the online version. Everyone warned me it was awful. I should have listened! It’s tragically bad. My teams tell me they prefer Freshbooks for small businesses. It has easy invoicing, time & expense tracking and they say it’s pretty simple to learn. If you’re not ready for that, I have an expense tracking excel sheet I developed for clients you can have, upon request.

PRODUCTIVITY

My personal preference is Trello because it’s relatively easy to use across teams with unlimited boards and timelines. Some organizations I support like Slack for team communication & project management. There are so many tools for this that it really depends on the complexity of your project and the size of your teams so you can best choose a tool.

  Evernote helps you remember everything! It's a free tool that captures information from web pages, mobile devices and allows you to search by topic on items you've saved.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Much has changed the last year in Social Media, especially engagement algorithms. It’s not about fans and followers anymore, but for business it focusses on building relationships (like real life ). If you need an advisory session to plan strategy and content for your social media, we can help. Personally, it’s not my primary promotional tool, just a way to stay in touch with long distance family and friends. But if you want to know what works for your unique business, let us create a strategic plan with you. If you love Meta . . .

They have launched a no-coding-needed AI Studio. It’s software to create a custom chatbot to engage clients in a dialogue. I have not yet spent oodles of time with this but for some businesses, it can save plenty of time and help your site visitors get answers while you’re away, like a FAQ page, but smarter.

AI TOOLS FOR SPECIFIC USES

Everyone knows about ChatGPT which is helpful in many ways. There are dozens of other AI tools for specific needs. Here’s a partial list copied from Google so you can keep it on hand. These are some of the ones I’ve used but new ones are added frequently so this is just a “starter kit” for you:

Content & Creative

• ChatGPT / Claude / Gemini: All-purpose assistants for brainstorming, writing, research, drafting emails, and complex reasoning.
• Midjourney / DALL-E 3: Create unique images and art from text prompts.
• Synthesia / HeyGen: Turn text scripts into videos with AI avatars.

Productivity & Automation

• Notion AI: Summarize notes, draft content, and organize information within Notion.
• Zapier/Integromat (with AI): Automate workflows and connect different apps. 

Data & Business Intelligence

• Tableau / Power BI (with AI): Analyze large datasets, forecast trends, and create visualizations.
• Google Cloud Vision AI: Analyze images for objects, faces, and text. 

We have many more helpful services and resources that we customize for your business to save you time & money.

Please share your favorite resources. Add a comment below. It helps us all! 

After all, knowledge is bliss!

 

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