Once you start your own company you are busy with hiring the team, building up the client base and most importantly delivering projects. There is hardly any time left for back-office and operational activities. Unfortunately, those tasks cannot be fully eliminated, but they can be automated and integrated to a high degree.
Here at CENTIVIS, we use a handful of applications, services that make our life easier and let us focus on supporting our clients.
What are these free or reasonably priced apps that help us run a lean, international consulting business?
Travel and Expenses: Consulting international clients means frequent travelling. When you are often on the road, travel booking and expense reporting can be a hassle. TravelPerk provides an integrated business travel booking platform and consolidates all your bookings under one company invoice. With the Expensify integration you can automatically add those invoices to your travel expenses and directly to your books.
Meeting room and co-working: Meeting with a client in Munich, New-York or Shanghai. No problem. Rent your own meeting room, order catering or just book a co-working space in almost 900 cities across 120 countries through Regus app.
Project management, time management: You run parallel projects with multiple stakeholders, tasks and timelines. Trello boards, lists, and cards offer an intuitive way to tackle project complexity and stay organized. Would you like to measure how much time you spend with each activity? Use integration with Toggl and generate time sheets for billing purposes. Do you also find checking calendar availability and meeting scheduling time consuming and low value adding? Calendly seamlessly integrates with Google Calendar and allows your external network to choose their convenient meeting time. Google will then automatically send the invite and telephone conferencing links.
CRM, sales prospecting: Starting a new business requires systematic sales prospecting and qualifying. It’s impossible to keep up with all the prospects and lead statuses. HubSpot offers a free, and customizable CRM solution. Link your CRM system with forms on your Squarespace website builder or even with the built-in newsletter, outbound marketing function.
Presentations, brochures, videos: SlideModel offers 20 000+ visually appealing PowerPoint presentation templates, icons and animations. Take PPT presentations to the next level by designing infographics, brochures with PiktoChart or create your own, simple video footage with Biteable. Focus on the content, let these apps help you with the visuals.
You might say: why bother with all these apps when you can also outsource many of those tasks? In case you’d prefer have it done by a specialist, Fiverr offers capable freelancer services all over the world.
Do you have a favorite business app that you would recommend us?