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Hey there - it's Brian 👋

⚠️ Warning:
This issue is SUPER nerdy.

Read this if you are sick of thinking about which software you need to run your business.

It’s a nerd rant on the software Phil Rivers and I use to run our staffing business (we take marketing admin tasks off your hands).

I do a ton of research on each tool so this issue goes into why we didn’t pick the other tools too.

No affiliate links.

Not thinking about software for your business?

Jump to the end to vote on what you want to see next (& I’ll see you next Thurs).

Let’s make your business an outlier: 👇

For my friends: What’s going on with Brian?

I’m back in Boston.

I’m here for my friend’s wedding. We’ve been best friends since we were 2 years old.

So it’s worth the flight back from Colombia!

I’ll be working from Peru next week.

Reply with any food recommendations for Lima!

Okay let’s get nerdy and talk software: 👇

How do we track customers?

High Level.

Highlevel is our CRM.

It’s just okay at a CRM.

But it’s incredible at tmarketing automations.

It’s best if you’re in a business that’s doing a lot of volume (say you’re closing 15 - 30 clients a month).

If you close fewer clients at higher ticket, this is not for you.

This sends emails, texts, Facebook messages, calls (etc) all under one roof.

Other tools we thought about using (& didn’t):

• Folk

• Copper

• Pipedrive

Those are better for you if you have fewer clients at high ticket.

Okay great so now we have a bunch of leads in our system.

Now how do we assign people to follow up with the leads?

How do we make sure tasks get done?

Asana

Now we need to track everything we’re doing!

The business has so many moving parts that we can’t keep it all in our head. So we need a task management tool.

We use Asana.

Other tools we thought about using (& didn’t):

• Monday.com

• ClickUp

ClickUp is trying to be the “one tool to rule them all.”

We don’t need that. We have Notion and Google Drive.

I just want task management.

Asana has great automations. Automations is important with us at scale so we went with Asana.

When we close a sale in HighLevel, a task gets created in Asana with all the onboarding tasks automatically.

But how do we connect these tools? That’s the next one.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:

My favorite personal task manager is Things.

The best task manager is the one you actually use.

If you have an idea for something you want to get done, you need ZERO effort to capturing the idea (or you won’t do it and it’s gone).

But it’s not for teams.

Best way I’ve seen to organize your task manager is in this video: (the PARA method).

How do we connect all our tools (to automate)?

Make automates our operations.

If you know Zapier, Make is a direct competitor at 1/6 the cost.

For the same thing? It makes no sense to me.

I like how visual Make is and it’s customizable.

We went with Make. We’ll use Zapier for any integrations we don’t have with Make.

We haven’t hit any yet.

How do we keep our internal team organized?

I love Notion.

It’s my favorite tool on the list.

So we use it for dashboards, wikis, and our internal how-to guides.

It’s the note tool that can do everything.

I embed Loom videos and visual workflows into each page for our SOPs.

I considered Coda since it’s better at automation.

But I can’t think of automation I would use for Notion since it’s just internal.

Everything shared externally we use Google Drive.

Shocked?

It’s not fancy at all.

Here’s why we use it: 👇

Why we use Google Drive for client facing things?

Two reasons:

1) More people are familiar with it.

I had lunch with a reader in Miami and she asked me what Notion is and how I use it!

2) It’s higher perceived value.

Imagine getting a PDF with a beautiful cover image.

It feels more valuable than a Notion dashboard even when it’s the same content.

I mean look at this lead magnet we built.

Doesn’t it feel much more value with a nice cover image in a PDF form?

So we use it to share contracts, guides, onboarding docs etc.

Plus… I’m still a management consultant. I need my slides.

Could you imagine a consultant without PowerPoint?

Anyway that’s enough tech tools for this week.

If you’re spending too much time in these tech tools and not working on your business, let’s chat.

We have awesome global talent ready to take your admin tasks off your plate so you can focus on your business.

Like updating your CRM, changing things in Google drive, managing emails, checking in on projects etc.

We’ll take your admin tasks for around $6 an hour.

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See you next Thursday 👋

Brian
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