What’s {almost} better than being a small business owner?  Having an entire week dedicated to it!  In case you didn’t know, this week is National Small Business Week – A time devoted to celebrating your hard work, can-do spirit, and a never-say-die attitude!

But despite all that’s great about managing your business, there’s a lot that goes into keeping it running smoothly.  Keeping up on invoicing, staying in touch with leads, marketing your business, staying on top of industry news, not to mention actually doing the work that your business does . . . It’s a lot to manage.

So this week, we’re sharing some of the tools we can’t live without as we manage the day-to-day in our own small business.  Hope they help you, too!  (***Note: We’re not paid from these companies. These are tools we love and think might help you, too!)

4 Tools to Manage a Small Business Better

Feedly

Whether it’s to learn something new, explore developing trends, or find relevant content to share with your audience, staying on top of the latest industry news is critical to your business success.  But it’s a major time suck navigating to all your go-to sites to find the latest posts.

With Feedly, you don’t have to.  This app compiles news feeds from different online sources in one place, making it simple to scan headlines, read full articles, and even share a great article on social media.

It’s got a clean design, a user-friendly interface, and a host of ways to keep your feeds organized.  You can choose different views depending on your reading preferences, highlight text, save articles for later, and more.

And since Feedly actually does the hardest part of content curation for us, it saves us boatloads of time searching for interesting things to read and share.  We bet it will for you, too!

 

Canva

Canva is a graphic design tool that makes us non-designers (ahem, Theresa) look like one.  It provides access to over a million photographs, layouts, graphics, and fonts – with tens of thousands of free ones. And all the rest only cost a dollar.

One of its best features is that it lets you size your graphic for specific platforms — everything from email headers to Facebook posts to Twitter header photos and more without you having to remember what those actually sizes are.

We don’t know about you, but we certainly don’t have the brain space to remember all of these. And even if we did, we’d rather use that space for something else, wouldn’t you?

 

Slack

You know that keeping in close communication with your team is crucial.  But sometimes email is too much or just doesn’t cut it.  Enter Slack.  It’s a real-time group messaging system that is So.Much.More. than instant messaging.

While it offers a simple chat function, it’s power is in its ability to create specific topic channels to keep everything organized and in context.  And if that wasn’t enough, it also has a host of other features, including search, file sharing, video conferencing, and app integration.  

While it hasn’t completely replaced the need to email each other, Slack has helped us significantly reduce how much we email, and it absolutely has eliminated confusing email threads.  We’re sure it can do the same for your team, too.

Teamwork Projects

No list of small business tools would be complete without a project management app.  And we admit, we’ve tried several.  While we liked pieces of each we’ve tried, for us, Teamwork Projects stands head and shoulders above the rest.

With the ability to assign tasks to more than one person, make one task dependent upon another’s completion, track time, add milestones, and create project templates, it goes far beyond a simple to-do list.

It also has a robust reporting function, handy integrations, the ability to tag and color code tasks and projects, as well as a host of other cool features – some we’re sure we haven’t even discovered yet!

All in all, it’s been a game changer for us, allowing us to work together effortlessly, manage timelines and budgets easily, and complete projects much quicker than we had before.  And that’s not only been great for us, it’s also been great for our clients!

 

Over to You

What tools do you use to manage your small business?  Which can’t you live without?  Leave us a comment and let’s learn from each other!