I'm gonna look at black Tech three money. We are headed to the end.
Of the year, and I got a special episode for you.
In that regard.
So when I'm making content, I'm thinking about what are the question? So I don't make content in a vacuum. Let me start there. I don't make content in a vacuum. And what I mean by that is, I don't just sit around thinking about what should I talk about or you know, what should I make a podcast about? Or what should I make a video about or etc. I'm typically in the mind of what question am I being
asked most frequently? Or what is an interesting question I've been asked recently, or what are things that I'm currently engaged with doing like what activities are currently dominating my
to do list? And about this time of year every year since I've been running a business and growing a business, I should say, not just running a business, but as the businesses have been growing, I'm thinking, you know, as I get through, like midway through the fourth quarter, I start to evaluate the systems that I'm using, the technology
that I'm using to run my business. And so what I want to talk about today is an exercise that I'm going through and that is you know, in December November, I'm thinking about what is the what are the things that I'm using to run my business.
And could they.
Be either switched out to something that is actually appropriate for our work, because I'm sure I like some points in the year, like whatever you're using in whatever category, you know, you may find something like, dang, I wish this app did this, or I wish it was more easy or more efficient to do this in this app, or I wish I had something that was less expensive, or I wish I had something that was more robust, or something that better fit and better suited your needs.
And so what I want to talk about today is ten categories and concepts for you to consider as you evaluate your tech stack at the end of the year, because the end of the year is probably the best time for you to make a switch. Start so January one, you're all new. It is very difficult for me, particularly because at least one of my businesses have a customer facing side and we hold a lot of customer data.
So for us to make a switch on our pos midyear is a feat and it's not something that's pleasant to do at any point, So why make it harder on yourself by doing it in the middle of the year.
So it's best.
To make a clean break December thirty first to January first, so that your staff can get time to prepare with it. Your customers or members or users or clients, they have
an opportunity to recognize that there's a new day. And so some of the things I'm going to talk about today are things that I use particularly, But I'm not going to give you like a bunch of app recommendations because it's like super simple to just go to Google and say what is the best software for X. So what I want to give you are like categories of things in your texta that you should be thinking about evaluating as you cross from twenty twenty three to twenty
twenty four. And this is something that will be applicable for the foreseeable future. So every year, you know this is an episode that would be relevant to this time of year. When you can make a clean break from what you were doing to what you could be doing, that is a better situation for your growth. Here's what's
important about that is I won't get number one. I won't get into a bunch of features of why I a bunch of reasons on why I graduated or transitioned, as the reasons I graduated from one app to the next might not still be applicable today. Like sometimes some of the apps that I used to use and switched off of because they didn't have X and Y feature, they might have those features today. So that's why I'm not going to spend like a lot of time like
giving you actual app recommendations. I may mention some, but I'm not going to give you. This is not an app recommendation episode. This is about the categories. And further, some of the software I used or used simply just didn't meet the needs of my growing business, or I could foresee that they wouldn't meet the needs ultimately going into the next period of growth, whether that be the next year or next whatever period however you want to determine that. But I could see growth on the horizon.
So it's appropriate for me at this stage at the end of the year, if I'm deciding to make a clean break on January one, it's appropriate for me to evaluate the forthcoming needs so I can meet the demands that my business is going to have before they become problematic. So this is again, this is an appropriate time for you to be thinking about what app what software, what technology am I using currently that may not be best suited
for me going into this next period. So the first one I'm going to bring up is like your accounting software I used to use, And I don't want to like disparage. I'm not disparaging any software. But at the time I was using particular software that I might mention that I'm not using anymore. It just didn't meet the needs I have at the time. And I started it, I evaluated it and in methanies, but as my business grew, it's no longer methany So I will.
Start with talking about fresh Books. Fresh Books was.
Something that it was an accounting software, and it is accounting software that I used to use for Creatio, particularly my marketing technology production company.
And so we used to use fresh Books.
For invoicing, for sending estimates and receiving money and et cetera. But as we started to grow and needed more like reporting and more balance sheet, more p and L rope bustness, we realized that fresh Books wasn't necessarily suited to do a lot of that work. Now again, I want to emphasize this, which is why I didn't really want to talk about particular apps. Some of the stuff that I left for jumping the ship from fresh Books to quick Books.
Fresh Books could very well have that today at the level that I could use it today, but at the time when I transitioned, it didn't. And again, so it's like no shade on Freshbooks. So if you are looking for an accounting software accounting platform to use, I highly recommend you at least take a look at fresh Books
and see if it meets your needs. And so I graduated because there were certain things I saw on the horizon which would determine I needed more reporting, more again, more balance sheet information and feature sets, more P and L stuff, more contractor and client you know, break down if I wanted to filter down to who I paid, why I paid them, which account I paid them, from all these different things to the level I needed one piece of software didn't have it anymore, and it was
time to make a clean break.
And it was easiest to do that.
From December thirty first to January first, the next one up, I would talk about project management.
Software we used to use.
Again, no shade on them. In a beautiful company, we used to use base Camp from thirty seven Signals. I'm not even sure if they're still called thirty seven Signals, but we used to use base Camp to manage our projects in my company. And so now today we use Asana. And the one of the things that was problematic when we were growing.
Is there.
And there's actually a principle at thirty seven Signals. There's a book that they wrote.
Sometimes let me find the name of the book, because it was it was rework. So they wrote this book called Rework.
Back in twenty ten, and I'm going to paraphrase one of the principles in and so one of the principles was like they built what they built and if it works for you, it works for you. Like they didn't. They didn't lean into like a lot of customer feedback and client feedback to building what they were going to put out in the world. They built a lot of their software for them to use and then they distributed it via the internet. So software, so if it worked
for you, also that's it. That was awesome, and so you could buy it, you could subscribe to it. But they didn't like lean on a lot of feedback and add a lot of features based on the demand of people. Their position was, if what we offer works for you, it works for you amazing. If it doesn't, we're not for you. And there's an admirable part of that that I believe, and there's also parts that just doesn't work
for me. So we decided to make the jump to Asama, which had more features, and I had just a little bit more experience because other businesses that I'm into we used the Sauna, so I had like a preview of the behind the scenes, and I recognized that this would also work for Creatio, which is again my marketing technology production agency, and so I highly recommend that you if you don't have a project management system, you definitely need to get one, probably in almost any business you're in.
Like at toll House, we use Trello because Asauna is way too robust for is way too complex, too many features for what we need for a toe House, which is a private member social club. So Asauna works for my marketing technology production agency, is not a fit for
my hospitality and food and beverage operation. So that's what we use over there, and that's Trello because it just allows us to simply go in and make edits to boards, switch things from more on board to the next depending on which status it's in status it is in, and
that's what we do. So if you don't have a project management system at whatever stage you're at, even if it's just an idea, it helps you get some organization around your thoughts and if you're actively managing your business, it helps keep people accountable to where they have responsibility and so you can have insight because if you're asking everybody or anybody every day what they're working on, where they're at in the process and etc. You shouldn't have
to do that. You should be able to just log into a dashboard and see where so and so is on this particular task, where the project stands in etc. So you should just be able to have a dashboard so you can have a high level view of where your business is, what are the ongoing projects in, what state are they in. So project management software we started with Basekent. We're now using Asanna in one of my businesses. In another business we use Trello. It works for using
up is a sales software. So what do you like pos like? You know, like, what are you using to actually make transactions and so some of these, like with Creatio, we're making the transactions by invoicing, so quick Books allows us to do that. So not only are we getting the accounting features, but we also can you know, use the sales features to where I can send you an estimate, you can accept that estimate, it automatically converse it over to an invoice, you can pay against it right inside
the same application. It's automatically dumped into the reports and et cetera. So I don't have to do anything on the toll house side, which is again you know, hand in hand combat it's a hospitality, food beverage. We use Square and so in side Square we have our customer accounts. You can build house accounts in there.
So you could.
We don't, but you could allow people to aggregate their transactions over a month and just automatically build against their credit card which.
Is on file at the end of the month. We don't do that.
So whenever you come in, you just provide your member I D and we just ran the transaction when you're done for the day. So but Square is what we use so far.
Now, I had a lot of consternation with some of.
The issue some of the features or lack of features that Square had. But one of the things that I have to consider are the issues that I have with Square such that it makes sense to transition to another one, Because I mentioned, we have a lot of customer accounts on here and so there's a very high barrier to making that transition. Then it would be if I just had a shop that has one transaction and I never really see you again, or I don't hold any of
your customer data. But for me, I invested a lot of money in terminals handheld, you know, mobile sales devices, and so I need to calculate and I have, you know, a bunch of customer I have to calculate, is making that change a reasonable ROI? Am I going to realize a reasonable ROI in a certain amount of time that makes it makes sense for me to change from one POS to another POS. Again, it's not just switching up the software, but now I also have to buy new
terminals to be able to go swipe credit cards. So those are things that you have to consider and consider them diligently. Do your research before you pick one, because once you pick one, it is very difficult and costly to get out of one, especially if you are building relationships with your customers and your clients, if you're just doing like one time swipe and keep it moving, it's
a lot easier for you to make that change. So one of the concepts I want you to consider is, you know, you really want to build, as you're thinking about your systems, a single source of truth. So whether that is what it is is a dashboard effectively, so a dashboard that you can log in at any time, whether it be an app or whether it be you know, something you built yourself, like an Excel spreadsheet that has
things automatically dumping into it in the appropriate spots. No matter what your industry, you want something that's either prepackaged or something that you built that allows you to have
a single source of truth. And what I mean by that is sometimes like when you're using different pieces of software, you know, you might have one customer reference in two to three places across different pieces of software, and sometimes things will get out of sync and not everything has an API to where they can all loop in talk
to each other. And so what you want to make sure of is is my sales reflected appropriately in this app versus this app versus this app and one way to determine that is by having a single source of truth to where I only look at my sales information in this application because I know if I look at it over there, it might not account for certain variables, and I only use that particular app over there for such and such thing like For instance, we've been looking
at seven shifts, which is an app just for scheduling our team, So when we're scheduled making next week's schedule for when people are going to work at toll house, seven shifts is a remarkable scheduling app. And they also do payroll. They also do tip pooling. They also do also do also do they do a bunch of things. We didn't want to use them for all those other things, but no matter what, no matter that, we decided to use them for those other things once we integrated.
It with Square.
It's pulling all this other information, but it doesn't account for all the other variables Square is accounting for. So I have to be determined and disciplined and only paying attention in seven shifts to the scheduling information because I know the labor information and the sales information that it's automatically pulling. No choice of mind. But just because they're integrated, the information that is pulling from over there is not going to be accurate.
It might be close, it.
Might be correct at some point or another, but my single source of truth regarding sales is in Square and that's the only place I'm gonna look for an accurate accounting of our sales information. So I said all that to say, what you want is to build a dashboard or find some software that you trust that is hopefully uh industry specific to whatever it is you're building. And most industries have these. Whether you're in trucking, or you're in marijuana, or you're in you know.
Food and beverage or whatever.
Most industries have dedicated and software built for that particular industry and the nuances that relate to that industry. So you want to find one that is most appropriate to your industry as you can, and then utilize just that
for the truth about what's happening in your business. The next one up, I want to give you another concept, and that was you know, these are why these are worthy investments because sometimes, you know, even in the beginning of my businesses, I was notorious and serious about hacking together my own stuff and at some point you have to invest in actual technologies that help you do these things better and help you see around the corners that
you might not even recognize. So, especially when you're venturing into a new industry, these apps and these softwares, these applications might have you do things inside them that you didn't even consider were important to do regarding that industry. And so again, just to give you an example, let's let's pull Creatio. So CREATI against a full service marketing technology production agency, and so I didn't know how to
do forecasting. But if you use a particular app based on your sales, you know, and if you're using it, especially over time, it starts to learn, Hey, you know, in the end of the third quarter beginning of the fourth quarter, your sales spike, and you should expect to be at these particular numbers, you know, based on your growth over time, and so then you can plan accordingly.
You might need to staff up, you might need to staff down, you might need to invest in new equipment, you might need to you know, start to talk to different types of clients and customers. And so those are insights that I would not have been able without the assistance of other technologies to be able to put together on my own. I may have known in my mind that we grow, we spike in business around certain times of the year, but to actually have insights into what is going on to in my business.
Is very, very helpful. So these are worthy investments to make. And so.
My point there is there does come a stage in your business to where you cannot just continue to do things alone. And here is a great segue into this next one. And so I do not allow anybody on my staffs, any of my staffs to create individual documents and to email them to people. For instance, you cannot on my team create a word document and email it
to me. If you are creating anything in the toe house team creative team, even is better be on a Google doc or Google Drive, because I don't want multiple versions of a document out there in the wild. Because what happens is is I'm going to create a word document. You know, I have to pick on Microsoft, but I'm going to create a word document and I'm going to email you that document as an attachment, and you might make changes to it. I might make changes to it
after I emailed it to you. And now guess what, there's two versions of that document, and potentially three versions of that document because you might have made a change. I might have made a change, and now we got to reconcile the changes. And so I don't allow people to do that in my team. So if you're working with documents, or if you're working with spreadsheets, or if you're working with presentations, on my teams, we use Google Drive. So I'm using Google Pages to create these things. I'm
using Google Sheets to make these things. I'm using all of Google's Google's offering of different applications to create our stuff. So that way, if you want to make a change, I can see you making a change on this one single document, and I can see the whole history of changes that have been made, and I can go backward in time. If I want to change back to a previous version of this thing, I can see the last
time you logged in to look at it. If I'm just emailing you attachments, you lose that ability to be able to make sure that you have one document that is accurate. And so whether you decide to use Google Drive or you decide to use Microsoft Office and send links to documents and etc. Instead of attachments to documents, these are things that are much more suited to making sure you stay streamlined. I will say, though, and this is again, I did not mean to say anything negative
about Microsoft. Is Microsoft's fantastic company, and I will give them a little bit of kudos in just this way.
I believe the Outlook app for.
iPhone is hands down the best email client there is for business. So if you are looking for if you're looking for something better, even if you like the one you got, the Outlook app for iPhone, if you're in business, hands down the best email client. The next one is social media management. And so I used to number one, I'm sitting in front of.
My desktop all day long.
My laptop is, but I'm sitting in front of a computer all day law. I'm not always in my phone, it's always with me, but I'm managing several businesses, so it's often a lot easier to do tasks via my laptop. And so I used to publish, you know, posts to our many our various social media accounts directly on the desktop clients, whether it was Facebook or whether it was Twitter. Twitter used to have a nice Mac compatible desktop client. They don't anymore. X X doesn't have one.
Anymore.
So now we use buffer for particularly our LinkedIn content and that's LinkedIn. Yeah so cause Facebook launched Facebook Business Suite, which allows us to do it right inside the Business Suite, and so I don't have to go to an external third party source to schedule social media content. Facebook offers that they didn't used to. They didn't always offer this. We used to do everything via Buffer or Who's Sweet.
Now we just use Buffer. And the reason we use Buffer versus who Sweet is Buffer was just less expensive and for the types of features that we needed Buffer suffice who Sweet is a fantastic app also, but it was just more expensive for the team that we had. But you should have something that allows you to plan
out all of your social media content. You should not, as a business owner, be sitting on your phone, Hey, I gotta get a post up before the end of the day, like you should really legit, be spending a Sunday night or a Sunday afternoon or a Saturday night scheduling out into the next week so that it's just automatic, happening automatically, Because unless you have something that you just really want to post because it's something cool that happens
in the moment you really want to think more strategically about your social media content, and the way to do that is to sit down and actually plan it. And so planning it in software that allows it to be automatically posted without you having to come back and post it manually is very very good and efficient use of your time and dollars. And so again, Buffer is one
that allows you to do this. You can set on Buffer not to sell I'm not trying to sell it, but I love that I can set the times of day that our posts typically work on, and it'll even give you insights on when posts. It recommends that you schedule posts for and you can schedule out as far
into the future as you like. And so and you can have multiple social media accounts in it, so I can see everything right there on one dashboard, whether it be Facebook and Instagram, Pinterest, even LinkedIn all of these, I can see YouTube, I can see them all on one dashboard, and I can see the calendar of content that is set to publish out in the future. One more I would give you maybe two more. I'll give
you another. One that you really need to think about as we cross over into a new year is purchasing and keeping track of your purchasing. I used to up until maybe even just a couple of months ago, all of our purchases on Amazon would be like on an individual Amazon account. Now I was using a business card, my credit card, but I was not using Amazon Business the business suite, which allowed me to create delegations, It allowed me to create departments, it allowed me to create
cost centers. And so for this one, it makes the most sense to talk about toll House. And so when we were building Tollhouse, I was using my Amazon account with.
The credit card, the appropriate credit cards, so that's the.
Right thing to do. But I was using a regular Amazon account to buy things that toll House needed. Whether those were cogs, those were calls of this old whether they were like things that we were reselling, or ingredients or whatever that we needed to make the things. I
was using the regular Amazon account. But now with an Amazon Business account and all other accounts that you can imagine, it allows me to actually do run the reports that I need come tax time and business evaluation time, and so I can see if we bought a particular thing from Amazon for this particular department or space or location
inside a Toehouse. Toll House has five bars, five lounges, a coffee house, a cigar lounge, a jazz club, a coworking space, all inside of one footprints twenty five thousand square feet, and so each of those locations, each of those bars are run like a different revenue center. And so previously I would not be able to buy some equipment on Amazon and dedicate it to a particular revenue center.
Now on Amazon, because I'm using the Amazon Suite, I can say, Okay, I'm buying this particular thing using the same credit card, and I can put multiple ones on there for my team to even if they have to make purchases. I'm using this and about I'm going to attribute this cost to a particular place inside tohouse. So at the end of the year or whenever you want, I can go look and see how much money I spent in this particular department based on the things that
I'm buying. You can't do that with just a regular Amazon account, and so that's just Amazon. So if you're buying things from other outlets and other retailers, look and see if they have business accounts that you can set up. Often they will want documentation like you know, they want to see your corporate structure, those documents from the state that you're in. They may want to see your EI
in documents. They want to see some sort of letterhead that says you are authorized to make transactions on behalf of this company. But the reason why you want to do that is not only for the reporting, but often they will have B to B discounts because they want to do business with businesses, and so there's there are many websites that will allow you to get ten percent off,
fifteen percent off just because you're a business. And so that's something that you think about how you're purchasing, not just be purchasing properly using a company card, but also what type of account you're using on many of these websites, you don't want to just use these as individual personal accounts. See if they have professional business accounts that you can set up once you get your corporation documentation in order.
Last one I'll give you is help desk software. So we currently at toe house, if you ever email the front of house, it automatically goes into our help desk software. I believe today we use fresh Desk, So if you email a specific email address that we created for a
toe house, a ticket is automatically created. And the reason for the reason why this is important is because in the earlier days, months ago, not too long ago, because I remember the pain and heartache of this, we would get all these emails inbound from either members or people who wanted to be members, or people who have a
members and we were always chasing down. There were several of us that managed the front of house email address, and so we would get these emails and we would believe that somebody responded to it, but we didn't know if somebody responded to it, and so and we didn't know how long it took, or we didn't know what they said, and so you would all I would always have the director that if anybody emails somebody BCC me, I want to see all the emails that goes out.
And so that is not like a full proof system. And so a fool proof system is to actually use software. And so sometimes they would becc meet, sometimes they will forget to sometimes it got lost in the shuffle, whatever happened. But now using the help desk software, we can all see when somebody emails this particular email address that we
created our front of house email address. It's automatically a ticket, so we know that the ticket is still open and hasn't been responded to, or if it's pending we're waiting for a response from the member or the client, or
if it's been closed. Hey, this thing has been handled, and I can go see the whole chain, the whole thread of conversation that went back and forth, which also allows me to ensure that we're responding appropriately in the tone, in the carefulness, in the level of care and respect that we have for our members. I can see it. So if we're just diving into emails with no salutation,
we don't do that at toll house. And if I see that, I can chime in directly to the person who respond to and say, hey, when we respond to emails, this is how they should look. You should give a greeting, give a salutation, say their name, all of these different things. So it allows me to create processes and operations.
And I leave you with.
This particular thing. This whole episode is about a business principle that I thoroughly believe in because I found it to be true and every the successful business owners founders at whatever level they are at all adhere to it, whether they cognitatively do it or not. Is I believe you can run a business without processes and operations, but you cannot grow on without processes in operations. So this
entire episode is for people who want to grow. If you are happy in your corner of the universe doing your thing in the lifestyle company that you know, it pays your particular home bills, you might employ you and your kid.
But if you are.
Trying to grow, processes and operations and all the ways that you run your business cannot be in your mind. They need to be written down somewhere, particularly like something that just shareable. And so it is important that you get your business out of your head into a system. And so I hope you get something out of this episode. I spend a lot of time on this one because I actually have to do a whole bunch of note taking in bullet points because I live this every day.
And so I hope that you got something out of it. If you did hit me in my DM on Instagram, I'm at will Lucas. You don't even have to actually even DM me. I might even just make a post so you can just put it right in the comments on the post, but I do hope you got something out of it. If you know somebody who would have benefit from this episode, also please share this with them.
So black tech, green money. I'm well, Lucas