5 Business Tools That Help Me Run My Coaching Business

Episode Transcript:

You are listening to The Book Your Dream Clients podcast. Bite-sized episodes from one coach to another to help you create and scale your business with simplicity. No hustle required.

Welcome back to The Book Your Dream Clients podcast. I am excited to share with you my favorite business tools that I'm using right now so I can work with my clients in a really easy and simple way. So sit back, relax and enjoy.

I've been in business for over ten years and my systems and products that I use are definitely evolving. There are some that have been the rock of my business, like Asana which is number one. Asana is life. This is how I manage my day. I have a very full plate. If you don't know, I have a full-time job, a successful business, and I homeschool my three kids.

So I have a lot going on. And if I didn't have Asana telling me what to do every day, I would be absolutely lost. This has been something I've been using for years. And I remember when I first started it, I thought, where has this been my entire life, because I've been writing things down in a planner since I was ten.

So it's been awhile. So if you're not using any kind of project management and you're just winging it with a planner and you need some help, definitely go and check out Asana. It's free. My clients ask me all the time if they need the paid version and they certainly don't, the free version works amazing.

That's what we use. And we have multiple people who are going in and out of our projects, so Asana has to be number one. I talk about it all the time and I can't mention my favorite tools without saying Asana. Okay, so the next thing, and this was a big move that we made in the fall of 2020 -  we switched over to Flodesk.

I have made a lot of email service provider moves. I think my journey evolves from  - over the last - over many years I think I've gone from Mailchimp to ConvertKit, to MailerLite, to ActiveCampaign, and then over to Flodesk. And my goodness Flodesk is so much easier than all of them combined. I love Flodesk because not only does it make my emails really pretty and fun to read, it's very intuitive and there's not a lot of extra things on there.

I feel like it's very feminine. And to me, I felt like it was going from using a PC to a Mac or a Samsung to an iPhone... like, oh! This, this can actually be easy! (That's in my opinion.) But I really love it. My open rates really increased quite a bit. The reason why I had moved from ActiveCampaign was because I was disappointed with the open rates that I was getting.

I know my stuff is good and I have a lot of subscribers, but when they aren't seeing my work, it's frustrating because a lot of times you're paying to grow your list or, you know, the work you do in your business, you would love for people to see more things so you can help them more.

And it was frustrating. So, it took a lot of planning to move over because I had over fifty automations to work on. I had a lot of things to do. It was a massive project, and when it was done it felt amazing. And I'm so glad I moved over. It was a great decision. It saved us a lot of money and time and headache, and all the things.

So if you have questions about that please let me know. I definitely recommend moving if you want, if you're sick and tired of what you're using, it does cost money every month. But for me, it was a lot less than what I was paying, so I was all for that. 

The next thing that I use many times a day is Voxer. So I've had Voxer for many years. We've talked about a lot about using it with clients, for client communication. And I definitely talk to my clients just about every single day. Almost every single one is on Voxer. It's just a great way to check in and say happy Monday, did you have a good weekend?

But then it's a great way to ask questions as they're working on a project, or they just need feedback, or they need talking off the ledge -  or they need just some motivation, or just a, “help me work this out in my head.” Voxer is so great because it's a way for me to communicate with my clients off call.

I do not use it for (SOCA) Stand Out Coaching Academy. I don't use it for my signature program or my club because I do have a lot of students and members in those, and I don't have the capacity to be in Voxer all day. So that is definitely a client perk and will probably always be a client perk. 

And I do use it for one extra thing. So I've tried implementing Voxer with a five day challenge. It works really well. The only thing that I'm seeing right now is, I don't know if a lot of people know what it is and they're afraid to dip their toes into Voxer. So I'm trying to figure out a way I can warm people up with it a little bit more.

It's a free app on your phone, and it's fun when they finally get it, because we can talk to each other. We can hear each other's voice. We can communicate, we can get feedback. It's just a really great way to communicate with people who are going through something that you created for them. So I really liked that aspect.

So using it in a five day challenge model works really well. But, clients are the number one reason why we use Voxer. I have the free version. I don't use the paid version. See, my Voxer just went off and I also use it to talk to my daughter because it's fun to send her little videos and funny things. And I just -  I think it's a fun tool to use. 

The next thing that I use every day is Calendly. So I started out using Acuity years ago. I recommend it to all my students who don't want to pay for a calendar service that works just fine and dandy. And the reason why I moved to Calendly a couple of years ago was I wanted to save some time.

I'm all about time. I was finding, I had to book all of these Zoom calls. I had to grab the links and send them to my clients for their calls. If I had a client who booked a twelve call package, that's a lot of Zoom calls to book. That's a lot of links to send out, and I didn't know how to make it easier.

I knew I had to do something. So I thought about hiring an assistant to help me do this. But then I decided, well, why not just see how much it costs to get a calendar service that will do all of that for me. And it definitely made a lot more sense to get a paid package with Calendly. So when I have clients who book their calls, they get reminders, they get the Zoom links and I don't have to do anything except put them in the Asana  project. That made my life a whole lot easier.

I think sometimes when we're struggling with time management and we're wondering, how can we make our lives easier? The first thing that we think of is maybe we need to go hire somebody. But instead of doing that right away, why don't you go see how much it costs to upgrade your services or switch services?

So maybe it can do it for you, and you won't have to spend a ton of money on help when a program can just do it for you. So Calendly I really love. We also use Calendly for scheduling our group calls. So for Stand Out Coaching Academy, I have all my students register on a group Calendly session, so then they all get the link to join the Zoom call.

And then it's all on my Google calendar. I can see who's coming. I can look at their questions for the call. We do the same thing for the Confident Coach Club and it works beautifully. So I love Calendly. The last tool that I use was another massive switch that we made. We used Teachable for years to house Stand Out Coaching Academy. And last summer when we launched the Confident Coach Club, I just didn't want to put it in Teachable. I didn't want it to have that - like, boring portal feel where it's like, oh, I have to go into the portal and do my work. I didn't want that. I wanted it to be fun. 

We ended up creating the Confident Coach Club on a standalone Squarespace website, but then I evolved it into and moved it over to MemberVault. A student of mine, Julie Butler created her program in MemberVault. She showed her program to me in the back end. I thought this is so beautiful, I loved it!

It’s great because it's free up to a point and it just seemed so intuitive. Again, I'm all about things that are intuitive. Please don't make my life difficult with unnecessary fluffy things. Just give me what I need and so I can make it my own, okay? So, MemberVault was great.

I upgraded right away because I wanted some bells and whistles, and we moved the Confident Coach Club there. I loved it so much. I decided to make the move and move Stand Out Coaching Academy there too, which is, which was another big project. And once it was over there, I knew my students loved it. They shared with me that they loved it.

I had a lot of great feedback. There's a lot of things that I love about MemberVault. I love that you can implement actions every time a student completes a module and give them a little cheer in the bottom corner - like the little confetti message. I love that they can check-off their tasks still.

Because that is something that my students really desire. And just the creation of each module seems more … it seems like a place you want to actually be, instead of Teachable or Kajabi. No, I have nothing bad to say about those, but I just really would rather spend time in MemberVault.

It seems like it's just more of a relaxed atmosphere and I just love the setting. It just makes your course seem really beautiful. And I love that you can see what your students are doing, who is engaging the most, who is completing the most modules, the gamification feature where you can reward your students and members for completing tasks and doing things is really neat. I definitely love MemberVault.

I recommend it now to all of my students. Number one, because it's free and number two because it's so easy and it definitely syncs up with everything. I was a little worried when I had to hook it up to Flodesk,  because I know Flodesk doesn't have any integrations really. And do you have to be friends with Zapier.

I have a lot of zaps running, I think I have over fifty zapps running. Zapier should be on this list too, because none of these things would be able to run automatically. If I didn't have the Zapier. If you're not using Zapier, go check it out. So those are the five big tools that I use every single day.

I work with my clients in Asana. I communicate with my students and members via Flodesk. I use Voxer to talk to my clients and with my challenge members. Calendly is for my clients and students to book their time with me, and MemberVault is where they learn and complete all of their trainings so they can grow their business.

Okay. Those are my tools. So there's a tool in there that you kind of want to try, and do you have questions about, definitely ask. I am an open book. Don't be afraid to switch things over, even if it takes up a little bit of your time. If it feels like the right move, definitely make it because the more you prolong it, the more you procrastinate moving when you know it’s the best thing,

The harder it's going to be, trust me. Thank you so much for listening. I will see you on the next episode and have a wonderful day. Before you go, I want to invite you to join my free Facebook group for coaches. Simply type ‘Dream Client Community.com’ in your browser and request access. And we'll happily let you in. We have amazing coaches that are just like you who are starting and scaling their business. And we would love to see you there.