I believe that happening. So just testing that we've managed to become live on a number of channels today. Just double checking everything. Believe we are scrolling. Yeah, I think we're on. Is that, okay, we're at, just, just turned four o'clock. Thank you so much for joining me again this Friday afternoon, where, um, I will be producing, presenting top 10 productivity apps that we like to use in our business.
Don't know me already, I'm Farzana from SF Digital, and we go live every single day on YouTube. If you haven't been with us before, feel free to put comments in the comments boxes and we can keep a track on those, and if you have any questions, of course, more than happy to answer those at the end. For all our regular supporters, thank you so much for joining us once again.
So the last couple of weeks I have been talking about productivity, and just to recap, previous weeks through September I was talking about the flywheel method and how we can use attract, engage and delight to really wow our, um, the customers on their journey as they approach our businesses. But as is very me, if you get to know me over forthcoming weeks, you will know that I, I don't want to just talk about theory. I want to actually see how that applies in our businesses and how we put those methods, um, into practice.
And of course last week I focused on productivity life hacks, so, um, not very app-led. I made suggestions of apps that could be useful, but there were real-life, um, productivity tips which can really help you to function better, perform better in yourself, which of course gives you the benefit of working better in your business.
So why is it so important to keep ourselves organized in our businesses? Well, I'm sure you are no different to me or the members of my team. We probably have something like this, that's our constant demands on our time in our business: things to do, bookkeeping, paperwork, marketing, reminders, more meetings.
Meetings have become more interesting as we've all had to embrace using online, uh, methods of keeping in touch with people. It's had its advantages as well. Clients that we probably, possibly wouldn't normally have gone out to meet because of geography, we're able to say, here we go, let's, let's do this online, and, and we've actually managed to win.
The disadvantage, I feel, after these seven or eight, coming up for eight months now of working in this way, is that it does feel like you, you lose something in terms of your memory points. You can no longer rely on what somebody was wearing or where you sat in a room or where the venue was for that meeting. Everything is on your screen, and actually that does make it very difficult to try and remember all the meetings you've actually had.
And again, I don't know about you, but I actually am finding it really hard now to try and remember when a meeting actually took place. All the recent weeks and months are beginning to merge into each other. But hey, that's just unfortunately a situation we are all in.
So I'm going to focus on some top 10 apps that we use in our business, and we've got a little list here, and I'm going to go through each of those just very, very briefly, because obviously, you know, in the time that we have, um, it would be hard to go into any great depth. Future weeks I will be dipping in, in certainly some of the main ones, probably Asana for sure, in a greater detail for everybody, so that you can actually see the, like I say, the applied way of using these apps.
This is not a sales pitch for any of these apps. There are many similar ones. I'm just focusing on those that we like to use within our business. So let's kick off with, um, Capsule in a moment. Basically, everything in our business does start with a contact, whether it's an informal phone call, an email, a contact made, a brief conversation. We do have to record that information somewhere, and for us that place is Capsule.
Capsule is a great CRM, contact management, uh, application that can really help you turbo boost how you manage your contacts. You don't need to use it like a glorified list, just listing in names, addresses, emails and phone numbers. It's actually got a huge amount of functionality. So you can actually allocate tasks that need to be done, you can put a date next to that task as to when it needs to get done by, you can forward plan your contact management, you can link directly to your invoices and your accounts packages. You can also build your email list within there, create multiple tags if you need to. A huge amount of functionality that you can do.
Just a very quick screenshot. It's just obviously a test run with my own details in there, as you can see under my name, um, and obviously where I belong in terms of, of which contact I am, SF Digital Studios. I've got, potentially I could be under three or more tags. So if I needed to find that I'm a lead, yes, I could find a list for the lead tags, same with Google Ads clients 2017 and umpteen other tags.
We use probably 20, 30 tags actually, to be able to have a master list when we need it, but also sub lists when we need to, to, to get into there, even down to the nitty gritty of your Christmas card list, you know, for your business, for your corporate. So there are lots of things you can use it for, and of course you can also keep a track of all contacts made.
So as I've said before, I do have a very good memory. I tend to remember where I've met people, what, what I need to do with them, but certainly my photography studio running days, that ability combined with the functionality of Capsule meant that when someone would tell me which school their children were at, or where their husband works, or where they work, I would keep a track of all this information.
So when I'm asked to ring back in six weeks' time, I've got a really good handle as to what's going on in their lives, what might be happening locally at their child's school, and it's a real great icebreaker and it just gets that conversation going. And I am genuinely interested in people, but hopefully it just helps to keep that memory in a safe place so that you can rely on it when you need to.
The next one I've got on my list is the G Suite. Now, this is quite detailed. Obviously we're going to go through just three or four of the main ones, um, today. We always use Slides, so there's an example of that one, we can knock that one off the list. Um, let's go to my first one, which is, uh, my favorite, um, feature of Gmail is probably using canned responses.
If you haven't had a chance to look at that yourself, please do go into there and look into the little button where you get the drop down list of your canned responses. This is invaluable for saving you time, because often we're sending out repeat emails. It might be an onboarding email, a repetition of a meeting time. As you can see from my list, I had all sorts of notifications, prize draw winners, portrait sessions, retouching, standard emails that are, instead of wasting your time continually retyping, you stick them into your canned response list, save it down, every time you want to use it you pull it up, personalize it again, and it does save you a lot of time.
And same with your email signature. Do make sure that your signature is as you want it to be. Make sure it's personalized, you've put all the details you can in there. For a long time now we at SF Digital have always used our headshots. It does help people to remember you and personalize your emails that little bit further, and it's a great way of keeping people in the loop.
My next one is Google Sheets. So yes, good old spreadsheets. It's a great way of keeping us organized, and yes, we use lots of other apps, and I mention Asana again for how we manage our workflow and our business, you can't beat a good old list on a spreadsheet. So often in our case we use spreadsheets as a way of parking up the starting point of lots of information.
So for example, we've got a spreadsheet which is dedicated to leads and conversions, invoicing, uh, quoted value versus actual value. There's a whole series of events which are all related to invoicing and the lead side of things. For example, there's a quick screenshot here of our video content calendar. This is actually an old screenshot, as you can see, it starts at number one. If I was to take that screenshot today, we're at 570 odd now as of today, so that's a very, very long list of our content and our videos.
And again, as I've mentioned before, yes, we use Asana to manage all our workflow for videos, but the core activity begins on a spreadsheet, because they all do have to be listed and documented somewhere, and that is on a spreadsheet.
Another example of using the G Suite is the Google Drive. So if you haven't already done so, I would really recommend that you spend some time with your naming conventions and your systems of how you park your information within G Drive. There are literally tens of thousands of pieces of information that all of us hold in our businesses, and there's nothing more frustrating when there isn't a standard way of how you find that information.
So, um, I'm going to refer to historically, when we used to have portrait sessions and images for people, everything was listed by client, by job number, by client name. Within that folder, zero one was always the raw images, zero two with the edited images, zero three could be the selected images, zero four would be edited, returned. There was a whole sequence where just the number alone would identify what was happening in that folder, so that never by mistake would we work, be working on the wrong images.
And the same applies from the screenshot that is on the screen right now. When we are working with Google campaigns, everything that needs to happen within a job needs to be systemized and logical, so it's easy to find, and there's just a brief example on screen at the moment. We come on to another example of G Drive.
Move on, Google Calendar. Now, um, even just going back to the time when it was just myself and Uzair in the business, um, guess who would be the one that would have to move their diary, because someone, no names mentioned there, would go and double book the diary. So for a long time now we've used Google Calendar as an easy way of identifying what we're up to and what we're doing, so this whole double booking scenario really should not happen. Occasionally it might happen, or it just means that we can see where everyone is.
And as you can see, we're using various colors to identify what we're up to, so we know that, you know, who's doing what, where they're supposed to be. This diary, again, this is an old screenshot, as you can see, but, um, if I was to look at a current one, I think we've got about six different colors on the go now for various activities. It just means that everyone has quick visibility of what's going on within an organization, and hopefully, especially those double booking scenarios don't happen.
Calendly, linked to your diary, is, at the moment, especially when we're trying to set up online meetings, there is nothing more frustrating than playing ping pong across devices as to, when do you think we could catch up? Oh, how did you want to do it? Did you want it by Zoom? Did you want to go on a chat? Shall we just have a phone call? It's become, we spend more time trying to set up the meeting than we do actually having the meeting.
So a great way of systemizing that is to start using Calendly. So all you need to do is basically go in, oops, to skip to line, you go, you go into the app, you set up a URL in, on the page model. You can have multiple events and you can group things together. You block off the areas of your diary that you don't want to release as being available. You can even put a buffer either side of any blocks of time that you're issuing, and that's it.
You send out the URL, the, the recipient will see when you're available. They don't need to see the actual activity that you're up to when you're unavailable, they just get the available slots, and away you go. And it's a great way of systemizing your diary times and your setups.
We also use it online through our website, when we're asking for people if they want to have a consultation or an online, um, chat. We're able to again set out the Calendly link, and it means that we don't actually spend any time whatsoever trying to set up those online meetings and audits etc. So it's a very, very handy little tool. If you've not used it, do, do give it a little look.
The next one is all about the money, so Xero. We use Xero, and have done for a number of years now, as a way of keeping up to date with all our invoicing, uh, basic bookkeeping that we're able to keep up to date with, and indeed keeping everything organized ready for accounts annually when they happen.
It's also more than capable of handling, um, currency, different currency transactions, listing all of those. And as you can see, sales and purchases are the obvious ones, your receipts, your payments, your statements, live feeds to your bank. In a more detailed way, looking at profits and loss sheets and balance sheets, you can do all of that within Xero.
I think I have mentioned this in one of my previous presentations: 2013, 2014, when I had to run the business on my own for a number of months, this Xero became my best friend, because I would look at Xero every day, and certainly every week in summary form, to know that I was on track and that I was invoicing what I needed to invoice within the business and making things happen.
It would have been very easy, again, if you heard the live, it, you know, it was a personal story and some ill health in the family, it would have been very easy to, I, this can't happen, the numbers are too big, there's no way I can run this business. Quite the opposite. Xero kept me on the straight and narrow and allowed me to make great number based calls on what was working, what wasn't working in the business, and it meant that I had a really good handle on that using Xero.
Link to Xero is, that's all very fine that we are using Xero to manage our bookkeeping, but of course it's the, sometimes the devil is in the detail, and it's in these small, itty-bitty receipts that we all have, just our petty cash receipts that are so easily lost in a business, especially when you're really, really busy.
And actually you will soon find that if you're not claiming your receipts, you're basically affecting your profits at the end of the day and you're probably going to end up paying more tax. So it's, it's in your best interest actually not to think of these smaller receipts as being of not really any great consequence, they're too small to be bothered with. You'd be amazed how much they actually add up to.
So I have Receipt Bank on my phone. So every time I have one of my handbag, purse clear outs, I will quickly zap through anything that's for business, quickly snap them through, send, put them into send, they automatically go into the feed, link up with Xero, and then they just need to be reconciled.
So whether it's something I've paid for my personal cash, or whether it's something I use my business card for, to pay for, let's say, fuel at the petrol station, they're all tracked and they're all in the system, so you never need, um, lose a receipt ever again. It also means that if you do need to look back on the receipt, you've already got it on the system, so you should be able to call it up if you need to have a refund or anything like that. They're all systemized. So I would really recommend using, um, Receipt Bank.
And then finally on the money side is Stripe. So this is a great integrated system allowing you to take online payments, all in one, one or two very easy, simple steps. You just need to set up the merchant feed and away you go, basically, and it means that the feed coming directly into Xero allows you to do the reconciling and it's all seamless. You're not trying to go into multiple places to try and sort out the transactions.
Because at the end of the day, no matter what our core business activity is, if we don't have a good handle on our invoicing and on our numbers, we will fail. Is, it's planning to fail if we fail to plan. So we must, um, look after our invoicing and obviously the, the receipt of those payments. So that one, Stripe.
And then we come on to Asana. So, um, like I say, I keep mentioning Asana. This has completely revolutionized what we've been doing over certainly these last six, seven or months. As I've said many times before, previously we were probably using this just as a glorified checklist, so in particular number one on these bullets, that's probably where we were, a little bit of things to do, but we hadn't really majorly explored the full potential of Asana and how that helps us.
We have gone through some rapid transformations in our business. They've been 18 years in the making, it's not been overnight entirely, but the changes have been very, very fast. The reason we've been able to manage those changes is that we have got Asana in place, and we continue to develop and streamline our systems using Asana as our main tool.
So for example, earlier today, um, we've just got a new client on board, and rather than trying to do everything through email and fragmented ways of getting the information through, I've just set up in the background an Asana board all ready for this new project. The new project is slightly different to some of the normal work we do. I can't say too much about it, very exciting project, but it is going to need some very, very careful management.
And I know that it won't be a problem, because I'll be able to use Asana to set that project up correctly, so that all the stakeholders within that project are able to be involved where they need to be. I can hook them in. You can, you can almost bypass your email system. Rather than having complex email threads where things do get missed, Asana, I know, will not allow me to miss it.
So, um, I highly recommend Asana. You do have a free model as well with Asana. We are on the paid model. We're on the, um, intermediary level actually, which allows us to do, um, more interesting and complex reporting and managing all our projects in portfolios etc. I won't go too much into the, the detail of Asana, because today is really a, a bit of a flow of what we can do with various apps to help our productivity.
Just fine, one final one in Asana, the portfolios I just mentioned. So for example, as you all know, we are on hundreds of videos at the moment, um, but they all go into this content management portfolio. It means that at a snapshot I can see, for example, for overdue tasks, I can see straight away what's going on with the videos, and it means that I can quickly dive into the, each individual project and see where exactly the hiccup really is.
So let's move on to online meetings. So I've, I've, under the title of one app, I've snuck in three there. We've got Zoom, Google Meet and Skype. Don't know your personal preference. Um, it's become a little bit of a joke in our office. Uzair loves his tech and he's into all things tech, as you all know, but, um, for some reason he has a, a dislike of Zoom. I personally like Zoom.
We were using it, um, before lockdown, way before lockdown. We've been using it probably for about three years now, but of course the frequency has really gone up. I think earlier this week I had eight online meeting calls, um, not, not even sure how some of the other work actually got done, because it was a little bit back to back and across a number of time zones. Um, but it's able to happen because geographically we are too far away, but equally at the moment, even if we were in the next, next-door neighbor, you, practically, you cannot meet.
So these online tools, get your head around them, explore some of the functionality and see how you can use them to make your business work more productively and effectively. Just go in and literally set up a link and have a play with the features, and be a little bit nosy, a little inquisitive. What do the three dots mean? What is hidden in there? How do I change to a virtual background so that people can't see I'm working from home?
Personally I'm not a big fan of the virtual backgrounds, because it does look like you've got a bit of a floating head going on if you move a little bit too far forward or back, but it has its place, and sometimes if you are in a particularly, um, intense meeting that requires a more professional presence, it does have its uses. So I would really encourage you to go in and have a little play and see some of the functionality.
Another functionality I like of Zoom is that you can have breakout rooms, which means that you, that, then get that interactivity. It doesn't always have to be a Zoom presentation where one person is the host and everyone is having to mute themselves to participate. You really want to get the next best thing to physically meeting, the informal networking side of things. Explore the possibilities of Zoom.
And I've informally helped a number of businesses throughout lockdown, telling them, please don't run your event as a boring webinar, turn it into a Zoom event. This is how you use the breakout rooms, this is how you get the interactivity and the buzz of how, of what you're actually doing.
In fact, for my birthday this year I had a Zoom murder mystery party, and that was going to be a boring webinar presentation, but I managed to persuade the lady, come on, you need to make this a bit more fun, and everybody that was in the breakout rooms, we were able to talk to each other and have a bit of fun around the actual event. So definitely worth exploring.
So we've got all these different apps flying around, and I've just touched on a number that we use. There are many more that we also use. How are you going to remember all those passwords and all those logins? For us, we use LastPass. It's a great tool of making sure everything is securely placed within a vault, and it also means that when you need to share passwords, whether that's within your team or family members, you can send them a, part, LastPass encrypted link.
They're not ever actually having access to your actual passwords. They are all saved in, within last word, per, LastPass. All they are getting is, like I say, the encrypted link, which then allows them access. If somebody moves on, you need to remove their access, it's very easy to do, because you're controlling it all from the vault, and you don't have to worry that someone is now taking control of all your social media or whatever else it may be.
And then finally we come to Canva. Whenever I mention the word Canva, and I think it's partly because we come from a printing background originally, I always say that Canva is not a replacement for a graphic designer. That is a highly skilled job. We must give it its due respect, and it, it is something that people, um, spent a long time building up that ability and knowing their industry as a graphic designer.
However, Canva has its place, because it allows you to design things on the hoof, very quick turn around. You can literally whip something up in a few minutes' time and it does do the job. But don't get carried away just because you've discovered Canva and you think you can play around with some of the templates and start dumping things down. Please keep a close eye on your brand kit and the parameters of what you're designing, especially should your business grow and you have a team of people who might be designing for you.
So for us as SF Digital, it's very easy. We, we say we start with our purple color, then what's our second color? Is it going to be black or is it going to be dark gray? And is the third color then going to be the white? Are we going to say that we are allowed to use tints of that purple, or are we going to say, no, we never want to see a tint?
And as our team has grown and they start to get a little bit inventive, shall we say, as to how they're going to use the colors, you can start to find that you are, start to go away from your own brand. So we spend a lot of time constantly updating our brand kit and making sure that the designs are actually consistent to what we're trying to output.
So for example, you can set up folders, and as you can see, Uzair has got his headshot. It's, there are two different headshots on the go, and there are three if you count the blue shirt, and you can see that everything is pretty much staying within the black, the purple and the white. There's a standard for where the Google Ads logo is, it's always got to be that particular Google Ads logo, and so on. And so this is what you can do, organizing yourself very quickly within Canva. Set up your brand and make sure that you're away to go.
Um, this is actually the 11th app and I left it in here. I had prepared the slide and when I counted I discovered I had 11. I just wanted to, I can't really talk about all of our favorite apps and not include ActiveCampaign. This is the way we manage all our email marketing. We also recommend this for any of our clients that are looking to build email marketing into their systems.
And what we love about ActiveCampaign is the functionality it gives you. I know everyone's heard of Mailchimp, but for us, for when you get onto the paid model of Mailchimp, for us, you must do your own homework on this, ActiveCampaign gives you far more functionality for about the same money. So I know where I'd rather spend my money.
It allows us to give us lots of conditional responses, you know, what happens if an email gets opened, what happens if an email doesn't get opened, where do, go, do they go in the loop, are they going to be resent the same one, are we going to tweak the headline. A whole load of things you can do in there. So, um, that's another little one to look at.
Just a screenshot here very quickly of some of the email automation that you can set up. So as you can see, there are some yeses and no's, and this is what I mean about the conditional responses and how you actually work, work through those. And there we have it. I think I've done quite well today, 4:28 on my timings.
Thank you for being with me once again today. I hope that's given you a tiny insight into how you can help your productivity by using the apps that are available to all of us and get that benefit. So yes, as I say, the last few weeks I talked about a lot of the flywheel method and how we need to consider the, these models when we're talking about our marketing. I talked about productivity in terms of looking at our own selves last week, but this is the business side, and it's about covering all those bases and making sure that we can, um, crack on and do the very best for our businesses.
I'm now going to just dip over and see if there are any comments or any, anything I need to keep an eye on. I think not. No, I think we're good. So with that I shall ask to take your leave. I shall see you all again hopefully next week, where I'm sure I will have another topic for you, and of course don't forget to join us daily, 4 p.m. UK time, when we always go live. So thank you once again, have a great weekend. I'll see you all next time. Thank you.
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