The Sean Lowery Show- Ep 102- 5 TOP Business Tools for Entrepreneurs that I couldn’t live without!
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1) Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Sheets I’m sure everyone has heard of these, and you may be thinking these apps are not that profound. Well they ARE! I’ve noticed many people don’t understand the power of google docs, google drive and especially google sheets. Google Docs is great for the simplest reasons. It’s your notes that, compared to a piece of paper, can never be lost, always be easily accessible and updated, be shared with others, and easily SEARCHED! The best thing about all of these google business apps is that they are FREE!
2) Grow I have been using grow for years and I look at it every single day to make business decisions. I’m sure it has some competitors, and it does cost money, it is an investment. Essentially the power of it is that it pulls in data from different sources to give you real time data. But what about if you need a quick glance and your percentage of ad spend compared to sales, and you need that number all the time? Years ago, after a struggle period where I was losing money, I learned that I need to keep advertising spend under 25-30% of sales to be profitable. Every business will have different metrics, but this was a very important metric for me. Many times a day I would open up my calculator, go to facebook & google ads to add up my daily spend, and then divide it by the daily sales at that moment to see where I was at. This became an incredibly tedious task to do all the time. After getting this platform, I now just need to look at one spot any time of the day to see ‘ad spend %’ from today, yesterday, week to date, month to date, last month, and year to date. It’s been huge for me to have this all in one place. You can’t run your business on just your instincts forever, it’s irresponsible- I’ve done it before! Figure out a way to use GROW (No-Code, Full-Stack Business Intelligence (BI) Software) or another similar company to track your important metrics.
3) Bench Bookeeping Bench is 100% online and links up with all your banks, credit cards, Paypal, EVERYTHING. 100% digitally. You never have to download and email PDFs. All of the transactions are available and they can be changed instantly. There are notes on each transaction if needed. Basically I need to do nothing but run my business. At the end of each month I digitally answer a few questions about categorizing transactions, and look over everything to make sure it’s all good. I get my ‘tax ready’ profit and loss statement, balance sheet, and income statement summary in REAL time. As long as I am on top of it throughout the year, tax time is so easy because all I have to do is send over the end of the year financial statements to the accountant. I’m sure eventually as my business grows, there will be a point where I want to bring bookkeeping and maybe accounting in house. This could be a CFO job who also helps make business decisions based on the data. But for now, Bench Bookeeping has been a heaven-send to me over the past few years for handling the important & annoying element of business- TAXES.
4) Paypal Working Capital If you need cash for your business, there is no better funding source than Paypal working capital. This option may not be available to everyone, but if you have online sales, and you allow customers to check out with Paypal, this could be an option for you. Let me explain Paypal working capital loans. You have a Shopify site. If people check out with their credit card, it’s processed with Shopify payments. Shopify payments sends that money to your bank account in one lump sum every weekday. You also allow customers to checkout with Paypal, if the customer chooses that option the money is sent immediately to your Paypal account, and you can transfer it to your bank whenever you want. In my experience I’d say about 30-40% of customers checkout with Paypal, so a lot of money goes through the Paypal account. Over time, once Paypal sees that you are bringing in cash, you will get a notification when you login that you can apply for this working capital loan. You fill out the form in minutes, and find out if you’re approved right away. I’ve been offered loans up to $10,000, and more recently cash loans up to $150,000. You accept and that $150,000 is immediately in your Paypal account to do whatever you please.
5) Oculus My first four tools were really in the weeds talking about digital organization, data decision making, financial reporting, funding- this one is more fun
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