Running a business requires more than having a high level of business acumen. It also entails leveraging the right tools to help bring your company closer to financial success. Naturally, a business’s underlying dynamics differ based on its size, industry, and objectives. However, in many cases, there are some overlapping business tools that your company can utilise for a greater chance of achieving success.
Whether you’re young or old, the recipe for scaling your business requires a methodical and strategic approach.
Regardless, if you’re a young entrepreneur who wants to know the best tools to bring success to your business venture, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll explore five potential tools to elevate your business’s operations and allow it to thrive in today’s cut-throat market.
1. Project Management Software
As an entrepreneur, you’re likely juggling multiple tasks at any given time. Without a project tracker or organising tool, this can be chaotic and you’d be highly prone to making some preventable and costly mistakes.
A project management tool helps you and your team structure their tasks. This tool simplifies the organizing, planning, and tracking experience for all business projects—past, ongoing, and future.
This tool visually provides a clear, visual representation of all your projects. It comes with deadlines, individual tags, and descriptions that help clarify the details of the particular task. This increases your productivity significantly as a young business owner.
A notable aspect of this software is its ability to clearly communicate tasks and expectations to the team members specifically assigned to it. This removes the need to make clarifications or meetings that could delay the project turnover, as the assignment is clearly relayed through the project tab.
There are multiple project management software business tools in the market that a young entrepreneur can consider. If you’re running a one-man show, Trello is ideal because it’s free and offers customisable boards and project tabs. Monday.com and Asana are also nice and unique PM tools, providing a better visual planner with better automation and integration options.
By harnessing these tools, you’ll no longer forget about your tasks and simultaneously eliminate the back-and-forth communications among your team members regarding their prescribed tasks.
Thanks to their online cloud storage, these business tools also provide real-time updates, making them a great way to streamline project management and fulfill tasks across teams more quickly.
2. Financial and Accounting Business Tools
Another vital component of running a successful business is being on top of your finances. You don’t have to be a financial savant, but you do need some tools to help you store money and make accurate accounting entries.
If you have a physical store, an EFTPOS terminal is essential for storing your money. This equipment acts as a cash register and works well with many software tools to make inventory and financial management easier. Click here to learn what to consider before buying one.
Besides having physical tools to store revolving cash and accept transactions, it’s also ideal to subscribe to financial and accounting software. These software business tools perform a wide range of accounting duties with ease and precision—from tracking income and expenses to monitoring cash flow.
The main benefit of this software is its ability to organise and centralise your financial data in one location. You can also streamline the invoice process with built-in invoicing templates, enhancing your and your team’s productivity to fulfil other obligations instead of manually crunching and entering numbers in a sheet.
There are many types of tools that fit into this category. Some of the popular ones include Xero and QuickBooks. These highly intuitive platforms have robust financial reporting and automation tools that support the bulk of financial operations. They don’t entirely replace competent financial staff, but they make task fulfillment for many financial duties much quicker.
Furthermore, these business tools come with integration capabilities and cloud storage, making them a great investment to get your entire team on the same page regarding your finances. This enhanced software helps make handling finances seamless and accurate, making it a great addition to a young entrepreneur’s business toolkit.
3. Social Media Management Marketing Platforms
One of the advantages of being a young entrepreneur is having a natural affinity for technology and the Internet. It’s incredibly easy—if not intuitive—for this demographic to create social media posts and other marketing content ready to be consumed by a broader audience.
However, getting your content actually seen by your target audience is the hard part. That’s where social media management and marketing tools can be a huge help.
Marketing management tools help you create, plan, and schedule posts for your brand’s social media page. This eliminates the need to manually post something at a specific time, allowing you more time to shift your focus to other pressing matters.
Some popular marketing tools include Hootsuite and Sprout Social. Besides scheduling posts, these software tools also hold valuable metrics on your page and post’s performance—all of which can be shared and accessed by your entire team. This information can be leveraged to create strategies that better resonate with your audience.
Besides that, there’s a wide range of marketing tools you can use to create better content. For instance, Canva can be used to create visually appealing templatised content quickly. You can also use AI video-editing tools to generate shorts and reels based on narrative subtitles.
In any case, leveraging social media is something that every entrepreneur should try to manage effectively. When done right, your business can scale and remain competitive in this hyper-digital age.
4. Data Analytics Tools
No successful entrepreneur runs a business on gut feelings and spontaneity. To achieve success, entrepreneurs should leverage data collected throughout their operations to build their empires to new heights.
Once you’ve collected these data points, you should feed them into a system that processes and turns these numbers into valuable insights. Data analytics tools are these tools that business owners ought to invest in, as they can help both you and your team figure out customer preferences and trends.
Various business tools help process data, with one of the most popular ones being Google Analytics. This tool helps business owners track website traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates. This information can then be used to create targeted strategies to drive growth and achieve your distinct business goals.
You can also use page-specific analytics tools, such as Sprout and Hootsuite, to gather metrics on customer behavior and other important information.
Furthermore, some crucial data points you can leverage could include a list of potential leads and clients. Apollo.io can help you in that regard, acting as a database to filter and find qualified leads. If you want to track your eCommerce store’s performance, you can use Kissmetrics and Mixpanel to see what’s driving customer behaviour.
In any case, equipping your business with data insights helps your business create targeted and smarter strategies. This, in turn, helps you make more profitable decisions when growing your business.
5. Task Automation Business Tools
Finally, another key tool young CEOs should get is task automation tools. Many repetitive tasks in the business can be time-consuming. While hiring an administrative assistant can help lessen your workload, some tasks may need to be more frequent or intensive to really require this move.
Fortunately, there are a lot of automation software that you can rely on to streamline these tasks. Zapier and IFTT are some apps you can use to automate administrative actions. These tools connect with apps like Gmail and Slack, making them a great way to improve cohesive operational actions.
If you have a visual image in mind or need to construct a quick business email, tools like Dall-E and ChatGPT can perform these actions and cut the time spent working on these tasks. For a time-strained entrepreneur, these automation tools help you perform a wide variety of tasks and routines with better speed and efficiency.
