As a former project manager and a “born creative”, I naturally have a thousand ideas buzzing through my head at any given moment. So, when I started my own creative business, I decided that post-it notes would not be sufficient enough to keep things organized. I needed something more.
Thankfully, we live in an era where there are wealth of free tools and resources available for anyone who has access to the internet. After doing some research and implementing several of these tools for my business, I thought it would be beneficial to share my experiences with others who are just starting out and may not know where to begin.
It can be overwhelming because there is so much out there. Over the course of a few weeks I’ll be uncovering some of the free tools I have personally found to be beneficial with my creative business. Let’s get right to it and start with the basics: organizing your business.
Financials
It’s absolutely essential to document your expenses and income when you are self-employed. And sooner, rather than later will save you in the long run. To be frank, I have reverted to Microsoft Excel for this purpose as I’m a sole proprietor and the financial aspect of my business isn’t very complex. That said, I know a lot of small business owners that use Quickbooks to track financials, and they offer basic packages for a pretty low cost.
Once you’ve chosen the tool you’ll be using to track finances, be sure and update your financial documents on a daily basis. I realized that for my creative business, I needed something I could update on-the-fly, as I’m constantly working on a different laptop or mobile devices, doing several things at once. As such, I began using some cloud- based storage applications including Dropbox and Google Docs.
Document Storage
Dropbox and Google Docs both offer free, basic services that can be accessed anywhere — all you need is an internet connection. I’m a fan of Dropbox because you can make changes to documents real-time and also share documents with other users. The same goes for Google Docs, too.
Google Docs offers other benefits for startups looking to reduce costs as much as possible. Google Docs is a free service and has essentially the same templates you get with the basic version of MS Office suite, but because everything is saved to the cloud, you can update documents wherever you can access your Gmail account, and share with other users.
Google docs is great because it offers a number of free templates in the application including word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more. As with Dropbox, you can make and save changes real-time to the cloud and share documents with other users. It’s a win-win in my book.
Manually transferring mass amounts of data using flash drives is just not feasible anymore. In today’s world where you can communicate with someone overseas on Skype at any time during the day, while simultaneously sending a proposal to a client over email, and texting your nanny about your child, you need to be able to save and update documents automatically.
As with any tool, there are pros and cons of each, but Dropbox and Google Docs work well for me for a number of reasons. I don’t have any employees so I don’t need huge amounts of storage. Dropbox offers a basic, free version of the application which gives you 2GB of storage, and if that isn’t enough, you can always upgrade your account to pay for more.
Project Management
When I started my business I had about ten major projects I was working on at once. The last organizational tool I realized I needed for my business was some sort of project management system to prioritize work and be able to see what I was working on, all in one place.
Trello is a great, simple project management system that can be implemented for free with a basic account. I have a few different “boards” that I can update depending on what stage I am in the workflow, and can organize projects underneath each stage. Probably my favorite type-A part of Trello is the option to add checklists for each project. I feel like this is essential for me when I’m working on something that requires multiple tasks in order to complete a deliverable. There is a lot more to Trello than I’ve covered here, but for today, I just wanted to start with the basics.
Next, we’ll take a look at how to generate leads organically with little to no budget!