4 Tools You Need to Streamline Your Small Business Growth

A gardener knows that the best way to make something grow is to prune, regularly and often. In both horticulture and business, you need more than your bare hands – whether it’s time to trim, streamline or optimize, the success of your undertaking always depends on the efficiency of everyday operations.

Let’s take a closer look at how the efficiency is achieved and maintained in today’s modern age when everything we do can be done twice as faster, more comfortable and better with a little help from new technology.

4 Tools You Need to Streamline Your Small Business Growth

When you’re running a small business, every minor task matters. Since your team is still modest and your budget is minuscule, your growth depends on two things – the ideas you envision and your ability to bring them to life. Some help is definitely required, but it must be fast, affordable and convenient.

Luckily, not all business solutions are expensive, and the following four tools are indeed worth investing. Together, they create a robust suite for both management and automation, guaranteeing all the advantages you need for accelerating your business growth one day at the time.

Task Management: Trello

The fact that your organization is still small doesn’t at all mean that your projects and tasks are too. To prevent confusion and manage workload, you need a reliable team collaboration platform that will allow you to keep track of everything that’s going on, to delegate tasks and work on them in real time.

Meet Trello, the most straightforward and most efficient platform for managing day-to-day operations within a small team. Keep your to-do lists up-to-date, create task dependencies and calendars, stay in the loop with everyone’s progress, add notes, and exchange ideas with colleagues wherever they are.

Email Automation: MailChimp

Email trumps other marketing formats with a median ROI of 122%, but only when it’s strategic and automated. MailChimp can help you create professional-looking emails and trigger campaigns, and you need to that once. Once written and scheduled for later, they are sent automatically, in mass.

Finance & Accounting: ZipBooks

If anything can slow down your business growth more than administrative discrepancies, it’s poorly managed accounting. ZipBooks can help you get both in order, and equip you with intuitive tools that make bookkeeping a breeze even on a larger scale. With this online accounting software, getting paid has never been simpler.

From invoicing and billing to accounting and expense management to smart insights and reports, ZipBooks approaches every aspect of bookkeeping with intuitive features that are seamless to use. It includes capabilities for team management and time tracking as well and is also available on mobile. Whether you're running your own business or managing a company with a few million in revenue, ZipBooks can fit your needs.

Social Media Automation: Buffer

To beat your competition in the marketing game, you need to build your presence on multiple channels. Without any automation, multi-channel marketing directly doesn’t pay off – it takes up too much time and money. Use Buffer to consolidate campaigns and control them from a centralized hub.

As your business grows more prominent, you’ll probably need to revisit your toolkit and include solutions for sales funnel management and customer service automation too. Until then, these four tools will keep your efficient and productive enough to complete every arduous task and realize every brilliant idea.

Author Bio: Jaren Nichols is Chief Operating Officer at ZipBooks. Jaren was previously a Product Manager at Google and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.