Are You Tech Savvy?

By Drue Lawlor, FASID
Director of Coaching at Gail Doby Coaching & Consulting

3 Essential Tools to Streamline Your Business

The first tool is Google Drive, which is probably the most well-known of the 3 tools. It can be valuable for any document that involves collaboration among your team – internal or external. It can be helpful for “living documents’” that will be updated regularly (like editorial calendars, checklists, documents that will be going through editing, etc.).

You can also use it for saving a PDF of the final version of a document after the team has added input. You might use Google Drive to store design drafts and revisions, final project files, drafts of your blog posts, master copies of processes and procedures, etc.

It allows you to keep all your important files and documents in one place but it has a huge amount of free storage that can be accessed from any device and it syncs up with Gmail. But realize to make it as effective as possible you need to have a system of organization in place. Set up a folder for personal and one for business. Then you can create subfolders for the various segments of your business such as clients, marketing, weekly team meeting, processes and procedures, etc. which you can share with your team so they can easily access all the Docs and files.

Another tool is Asana a work management platform your team can use to stay focused on the goals, projects, and daily tasks to grow your business. Use it to plan out every step and organize the details of your work in a single location. It allows you to see an overview of where everything stands and to easily move your work through multiple stages quickly and easily. Use the timeline to make sure you stay on schedule and hit your deadline. Map out your project plan to identify and address problems before you start. And again this is a program that you can share with your team so that everyone is on the same page. The program allows you to be flexible and easily adjust and modify plans as you go to keep projects on track.

Finally the third tool that can be an advantage to your business is Slack. Slack is described as “… a collaboration hub, where the right people and the right information come together, helping everyone get work done.” Is your business overwhelmed with texts and emails? Slack offers the ability to streamline conversations among your team. With Slack conversations happen in channels and are organized by topic, project team or whatever works best for your firm. By using channels (that you create for what works best for your team) information gets to the right people and does not have to go to those who do not need to know or respond to the information.
If you are not using these tools, take a serious look at how they can simplify your business and create the opportunity to increase your profit margin. “Do something today that your future self will thank you for.”