Running a business is a complicated endeavor, but everything can run smoothly with the correct productivity tools. It may feel like every single task requires specific thought and process. And if you don’t get it right, you risk losing sales, customers, which will result in the entire failure of the business.
It might feel like you’re sweating the small stuff while you’d rather be thinking big picture. Wouldn’t it be great to just do away with all these time-consuming admin tasks? Unfortunately, you probably can’t.
But the good news is you don’t have to do everything on your own.
Digital technology has solved many real-world business problems — and made several small business owners’ lives a lot better… or at least more efficient.
Check out these 10 underrated, but still very good productivity tools you could start using today.
Slack
This tech industry startup provided many solutions for asynchronous team communication as well as collaboration. It’s a perfect tool for any business — online shops, anime news sites, clothing brands, fitness studios, drop shipping companies, game developers, social media startups, etc.
Unfortunately, not everyone sees Slack the same way as we do.
For some, it’s just another app to use. But with its powerful features, we’d say that it’s all about how you maximize such a free and versatile tool. Although many paid apps would seem more fitting for a growing business, Slack does the trick without sky-high costs.
Team members can customize their settings on Slack and share files directly with one another or large teams all directly. With many project management integrations to boot.
The only downside we see is, if you want a bigger space and have access to archived conversations, the price to pay is around US $8 for each member of your team.
If you don’t want to spend that much, strategically combine Slack with other free tools like Trello and Google Drive to enhance your project management game. This will compensate for the limited space and messages available to view in a free plan.
G Suite
Consider this the mother ship. What does G Suite do? The answer is a lot. Wouldn’t it be great if you could purchase your domain, set up a customized email client, or manage and collaborate on internal documents all in one place?
Sadly, not everyone has realized that G Suite does a lot better than other productivity tools. Moreover, its future is indeed very promising. Thoughts a good product but people still prefer g suite to office 365 migration due to its extra premium features.
What if you share calendars, track analytics for your website, and launch ad campaigns easily accessible on your phone, computer, or tablet? Add G Suite on top of your SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEO, and that’s all your business needs so it can thrive.
Enter G Suite. Starting at just $5 a month.
Grovo
One characteristic of a small business is its ability to constantly tweak operations, figuring out what works as it goes along.
What if you can document these processes and steps for future employees? Grovo lets your employees share what others need to learn so that you can easily train new hires without having to reinvent the wheel every time.
If you have a team of virtual assistants, it’s crucial to have them use Grovo at an early stage so you can reap the benefits in the near future.
Grovo turns these trainings into “micro learnings” that new hires can quickly withstand while working.
GoodHire
The hiring process is not as easy as it appears to be. When it’s time to recruit, you’ve got to take on background checks, identity verification, reference checks, and employment verifications. Don’t forget pre-hire skills tests, credit checks, drug screenings, driving records, and education/degree verifications, which are all complex processes. GoodHire can make it all happen in less than 24 hours.
Remember that a bad hire can be devastating to a business and its effect can be felt for a year or more, even if that employee is no longer working in the company. A pre employment testing can be taken for the purpose of assessing the abilities of the applicants. These tests help the employers in assessing the abilities of the employee candidates through various tests like Psychometric Tests, Domain Tests, Spoken English Tests, Behavioural Tests, Coding Tests, etc. For 100% success in finding the right candidate, it’s either you make great use of chatbot and knowledge management, or let GoodHire do the task for a reasonable price.
Fiverr
Fiverr is another great tool for outsourcing small business needs, but it’s better for one-off tasks as opposed to long-term working relationships. As such, people tend to ignore its potential and go for bigger options like Upwork.
But still, you can make use of this marketplace to get acquainted with some talents if you feel like you can’t find anyone who’d do a short-term job in Upwork. Many freelancers or part-timers are looking for a good place to stay, and if you don’t want to feel pressured, Fiverr is a no-strings attached platform where gigs are indeed, gigs.
Jira
Jira is unrivaled in its capacity to cultivate team collaboration as well as authorize individual contributors. Added functionalities include calendar planning, project workflows, whiteboard tools, and more.
We’ve seen some clients leaving Jira for Zoho, ActiveCollab, Asana and a lot more. Some small businesses even went for Trello.
Jira is still one of the best project management tools for developers, software engineers and product builders. With this tool, you can tag colleagues and unearth tasks and other to-do’s buried deep in the list of deliverables.
Hootsuite
This software allows you to manage multiple social media platforms in one place and track success. It also lets you moderate comments, view stats and organize your content.
Like its more favored competitor Buffer, Hootsuite makes a good tool in building a backbone for your contents and interacting with followers. The free plan will let you set up three social media profiles, which is good enough for a startup.
SproutSocial
Another social media tool less heard of is SproutSocial. The site contains powerful blogs, but businesses still opt for more popular alternatives like HubSpot and AgoraPulse.
Building your brand on social media is hard work. SproutSocial’s job is to assist you through social media management and guide you along the way with strong analytics and success tracking. It can also help you to establish topics for your customer care.
Freshbooks
FreshBooks helps create invoicing easy, among other things. It helps you to request payment from customers, track hours spent on projects, manage expenses, and offer clients multiple ways to secure payments.
Non-pro accountants tend to sign up to tools that give more than what they need. As such, they pay for extra services they can’t use with other leftover features untapped throughout their months or years of subscription. Though FreshBooks is somewhat popular but people still tend to pay a little more extra to QuickBooks Pro Cloud Hosting due to its upmarket features.
Blendo
With such a large amount of moving parts, from sales to customer service, marketing, and HR, Blendo allows you to track data from all corners of your business so you can make sure you aren’t lacking in any one place—and learn where your business can make improvements from a bird’s eye view.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many productivity tools to help make your life easier and boost your small business. Many of the above tools will surely help!
Think long and hard about what your business needs before jumping into any process you’ll need to untangle yourself from — or expensive subscription service contract you can’t get out of.
But one thing is for sure—if your business features a method drawback, there’s probably a digital solution for it. Do your analysis and facilitate your business to be the best-run business it can be.
Business is replete with countless tools that are meant for numerous purposes – from managing to promoting, to even building. But at some point, you’ve got to work out a way on what tools to choose and which you should leave alone.
[Images – Main Image by Rondell Melling from Pixabay; other images from their respective websites and/or social platforms]
Web developer, digital marketing specialist, career coach and content writer. Loves tech and anime, Hunter x Hunter is my favorite. I still play games when I have the time, but I’d rather indulge myself in a hot bath and a California King Bed in a 4 or 5 star hotel. I must share that I’m grinding hard so I can cosplay Chrollo Lucilfer of HxH and Dante of DMC soon!