Small Business Starter Pack: What You Need to Grow Your Small Business

Make sure your small business operations are efficient and clutter-free with these easy-to-use tools

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You’ve made a business plan, financed your initial capital, accumulated your permits and registered your business. What’s next?

As a business owner, you have to wear many hats: Owner, marketer, HR manager, accountant, customer service, and more. With so many tasks on hand, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. This is especially true when it comes to sorting out what online tools best fit your business needs.

That’s where we come in. We’ve filtered out the noise and picked the best of the best in terms of software in this small business starter pack, so you can spend more time on what you love about your business.

Finance first

When it comes down to it, taking control of accounting should be your first priority. One free software to help you get started is Wave. This starter solution lets you shoot off invoices, scan receipts, and manage the books. Perfect for getting your feet wet.

Of course, you can always graduate to other programs like Quickbooks or Square, which makes it easy to see your current revenue stream, send out invoices, and pay bills.

Get started with marketing

How can you easily create materials for marketing your business? You’ll need at least a website, and you may need print materials, too. That’s why in this small business starter pack, we’ve included providers who are both comprehensive and easy-to-use:

  • For websites, Squarespace makes it easy to throw up a website in 5 minutes
  • Need online graphics and logos? Canva is the gold standard for free online graphics creation
  • For print materials, use Vistaprint to order everything from business cards to stationary
  • If you plan on managing an email newsletter, you’ll want to signup with Mailchimp, which is free up to your first 2,000 subscribers

Communicate clearly

You’ll need to communicate with your team members, especially if you have a remote team. Skype is probably the easiest platform to use since most of your employees likely have used it in the past. In addition, to have a chat menu, you can quickly make video calls and audio calls with employees from all over the world.

As your team expands, you may choose to migrate to Slack.

Get everything done

It is essential to make sure that every task is completed. When we talk about project management, you need to be able to track tasks and give your team members access to relevant information.

In terms of access, you can give your team access to all necessary materials through free programs like Google Drive. Here they can drop in completed files, making it easy to find documents.

If you actually want to make sure each task is being checked off the list, you can opt for Trello or Asana. Trello acts as a list of index cards that can be moved to different stacks depending on where you are in the process. You can even include checklists and other media inside each notecard, making it easy to keep all files together. Plus: It’s free.

As your HR administrative tasks get longer, you’ll also want to look into finding a strong HR software for your business that can handle payroll, scheduling, training, and more.

Keep growing

Want to keep moving forward? Sometimes all you need is some expert advice. Clarity.fm allows you to call and talk to an expert in any industry for as little as a few cents a minute. From marketing to finance to industry-specific hurdles, you can get expert insights on how to resolve your issues and move forward in your business.

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