
Episode # 11 - My Favorite Online Tools
Today I want to share the tools that have saved me time and money and sanity. I figured they might help you too, in this quest for getting more streamlined and efficient in the face of the apocalypse.
In today’s episode, I talk about tools that can streamline your business and save you time and money in the process. While we’re coping in uncertain times, our business systems can still thrive with the right tools in place. It doesn’t matter if you are just starting out or seeking to update your current tools, this is the episode for you. So, join me while I talk about one of my favorite things. I promise you can’t go wrong with what I’m about to share with you.
Here are the things we cover:
- The fact that I can't figure out that Joan Jett and Jane Jetson are two different people. (My husband thinks its funny and wouldn't edit it out.)
- Why you absolutely need a project management tool
- Why you absolutely need accounting software (no, not Excel)
- A fair warning against the constant loop of finding the “right” too
My favorite tools:
(This site contains affiliate links to products we frequently use and want to share. If you click through these links , we may receive a small commission for purchases made at no cost to you.)
- Teamwork - the project management software that runs my business
- Slack - the messaging system that keeps my team together on the work and each others' lives
- Quickbooks - my favorite accounting software to help you know your numbers. (The link will give you a 50% discount for the first 3 months!)
- LastPass - the encrypted vault where I keep passwords, bank info and credit card numbers
- Zoom - video conferencing for client meetings, team member interviews or just catching up and actually seeing each others' faces
- Acuity Scheduling - scheduling software so people can easily make appointments with you without the time suck of the back and forth emails.
- Dubsado - document automation to send proposals, invoices and contracts without you having to create and send each one. Perfect for onboarding.
- SendOwl - digital product delivery that doesn't require a complicated shop or expensive software.
- GSuite - taking the email you got with your website (@yourdomain) and running through GSuite gives you all the benefits of the gmail suite
- Tunnelbear - The VPN I use to keep me safe while using free wifi at coffee shops etc.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Episode 11. So today I wanted to share the tools that have saved me time and money and sanity. And I figured they might help you too, in this quest for getting more streamlined in the face of the apocalypse.
On an aside I think that we have been seeing like this wave where we It was really crazy in March and April and then it was kind of chilling out and now it's getting a little crazy again and there's like this, this not second wave of the virus but second wave of like, panic, especially with restaurants and businesses that can't be open. So I just wanted to give a shout out to you all that are struggling right now and just say that we are all thinking about you and I'm going to try my best to give you as much help as I can. And if there is anything that you would really like to hear about or would like to get advice on, if you go to www.ReynoldsOBM.com/podcast, there is a form on there, you can submit ideas for the podcast, anything you want to hear me talk about, or hear other people talk about, because I'm going to start having guests soon. If there are things you want to hear about, please drop me a line in there. I would really appreciate it. Because I want to really help everyone out there right now. Because I know this isn't easy. This you know, some businesses are getting hit much harder than others.
So Alright, so back to our show today. This is a lot of the topics we've been discussing so far, can be applied no matter where you are in your business. The topic of tools is no different. So if you are just starting out, you can't afford a ton of help right now. tools will be really helpful to you, right, you can automate things that you might otherwise pay someone for. If you are already in business, and you want to just get streamlined and efficient, and take home more of what you're making tools, online tools, software, that kind of thing can really be helpful. And I know some of you out there are getting hit harder, right, so you're gonna have to cut team members, because this whole pocalypse thing and you might be feeling a little overwhelmed. So I want to share my tools with you too, because no one wants to have to cut team members but trying to keep alive when you might be being feeling like you're being drowned. That may be the difference between being able to cut some expenses and save some things and automate things and make them faster and more streamlined, so that you can keep above water.
Before we get to the actual tools on some of these tools, there's going to be different levels of learning for anybody. Some of you are going to hire someone just to set some of these up, show you maybe how to get them going how to use them, and then you just kind of go in and you know, send the email in ConvertKit or whatever it is. Some of you are going to hire someone to do the whole thing for you, whatever the thing is, you're just going to say, I don't have time for this, you just got to do it. Some of you are going to want to get in and learn all about it. Maybe you really love it. Maybe you know that this is going to be a big part of your business and you want to be in control, so that you are not beholden to anyone because they are the only ones who know how to do the thing. There are certain things in my business like I have not learned how to edit podcast because my husband Brian has been great about it. I've had to get in and learn other sections. Like I'm teaching myself ConvertKit right now and it sucks. It sucks. But you know what, it's not worth it to me right now to hire someone to have an email sent out a week because I'm just not focusing on that right now. There's different levels that we're all going to learn. take away from this conversation what you need right now, and then maybe think about what you might need a little in the future.
So no matter what though, I want you to have an undestanding of how the basics of the software work. In theory, I know how the podcast editing software works, I don't know how to do it, I haven't put my time into it yet. That's not where I've been focusing. But I want you to understand the basics of how things work. If you have emails being sent out through an email provider like MailChimp, or ConvertKit, or Active Campaign and things like that, well, you understand the basics of how they are done. So in a pinch, if you have to, or if you have to cut back on your tea. (Of course, you're gonna have an SOP for this because that was what we talked about last week, right? Getting really detailed and writing all this stuff down). So in a crunch, you will still be okay, and you can still go forward and you can hop in there and say, Hey, okay, I can I can figure this out. Right? I can figure this out for a little bit. So I want you to have an understanding of how these things work, even if you're not in the business and you don't know the details of everything. And then if you have to get in there, there's an SOP created by that person who does it. And that's going to save you a ton a ton of worry, especially in this kind of crazy market that we're in right now.
The first one I'm going to tell you about is my favorite thing in the world. Because it my whole, everything is run by this. And that is my project management tool. And that's Teamwork, all the way. There are a ton of them out there. And this is a very divisive issue. It's almost like a sports team. Everyone who deals with these kind of softwares totally picks one and then roots behind them and gets jerseys and the whole crazy thing. I am a teamwork girl all the way. The reason is my team can run very, very smoothly on it. We can track time in there, I can assign projects, I can make conditional tasks, what I do attach them somebody else can get the task like all these interconnected complicated kind of things can be set up on a recurring basis and it just kind of set it forget it. The biggest deal with teamwork is that you can make templates I have templates for like all the recurring things for each client. And in the beginning of the month, I hit the template into the main project task list, and like the 30 something tasks come up on everything I've got to do. They're all assigned to the right day. And that's it takes me five minutes and the month is planned out. There are other ones that I do not know. Well, because I'm a Teamwork girl. The big one is Asana. That's the same way that Teamwork kind of works in checklists and things like that, although teamwork can work with Gantt charts and calendar view. And whatever that view is with the cards. It looks like stickies that I can't remember right now, and someone will tell me later, but I'm a task list girl, I like a list that I can check off. That's how my brain works. But a lot of other people are very visual. And they're maybe going to like Trello, which is it looks kind of like cards or sticky notes in columns and you can move them around and it's very visual. Asana is another project management tool that has like checklists. I think they have kanban that like the sticky note thing. I don't know I don't really use it very much because I'm a teamwork, girl. But there are lots of these things. Another one big on the market, all the people in my world are talking about right now is called Click Up, very similar to Teamwork. They all are in different price ranges. So a lot of these have free versions to Mark has at least a free month, they might have a free year if you have a startup, things like that. Trello and Asana have free versions, and then the more features you want, you'll pay more or if you want team members or things like that you pay more. So that is project management and it runs my business. Things are set up in there in templates and recurring, and my team can go in and see exactly what they have to do for the day, every day. Every day we go and we look at our dashboard. It's customizable, and I go, Okay, this is what I have to do for the day. And that's it. There's no like flipping back and forth between seven different places. It's all in one place. I can see what's going on, they can see what's going on. And I can also see that they checked off all their stuff. So I know that they've done their stuff and I don't have to follow up and go. "Hi, what did you do today?" So it makes it much more streamlined. I don't have to micromanage and I love it. I love it. It keeps me very, very organized.
So to talk to each other, because we're all virtual, right, I know a lot of people that are coming from corporate or an in person kind of company, but now everybody's virtual. To keep that kind of camaraderie and the chatting nature of things. I'm just a communication without having to send 175 emails, so we love slack. You can talk to everyone, you can either talk to one person directly as a direct message, or you can talk to a group, you can post things daily, like we have a beginning of day end today, what we're going to do for the day channel that we posted so we can kind of keep track of what's going on. I know what my other team members are doing. And then there's by client. So if we're all working on a project, there's a client channel, where all the team members that are on that project can then talk about that kind of stuff. And then we can let each other know. And then there's just like a Hey, like, What are you guys doing this weekend, just check it into your family, how's your kid feeling I heard he was sick, that kind of thing. And it really keeps a team environment. When you don't see people. Out of the three people on my team, I've only ever met one of them in person. So it really helps to keep us all connected.
Then we have one of the other most important things you can have in your business. Probably the most important thing, if you were especially if you're by yourself, you could probably get away without project management software, and you definitely get away without Slack. But you cannot get away without accounting software. You can't. You can't. You have to do it. It does not work on an Excel spreadsheet. You cannot reconcile your accounts very well. Unless you have extremely simple books, but even still, you won't be able to run reports. It's so much more work. It's worth a couple bucks a month that it costs. It's really important You want to be able to pull reports to give to your accountant easily without taking more time out of your day because we are not free, right? So it takes us three hours to make a report, how much does that cost in our time that we could be spending making money on clients. So pay the money. It's a couple bucks, and all of these, not all of these, but most of these, if you go to my website, I have some links for some of these, you'll get a discount code, if you click using my website. So if you go to QuickBooks, I know that there's a discount code on that. So if you want to give it a shot on there, but this is so, so, so important, and I'm going to tell you why I love QuickBooks. I mean, it's industry standard. Everyone uses it. Every accountant knows it. So you can come in and have someone work on your books very easily. They know how it works. But the biggest thing for me with QuickBooks is that they offer a free ACH payment option. So when you send an invoice out to a client, and you want them to pay online versus like mailing your check which no one wants to do in these days because they have to deposit the check and That that becomes a nightmare, right? So you can get a credit card payment or a free ACH right through your invoice, you send them an email right from their email, they click the Pay button, and they get brought to QuickBooks, they either enter their credit card or their bank information, and they pay and that's it. Credit cards are the standard I think 2.9% or 3.5%. I don't remember off the top my head, I want to say 3.5%. And that is a lot. Like on a $30 invoice it's not but at a $5,000 invoice, it's a lot of money. It's like hours of your time worth of work, depending on what you charge hourly rates, right. So it's a lot of money, but they have ACH. Now, you have to wait a little longer. You probably have to wait five days, but it's free. And there are very, very, very few places that you can get payments processed for free. I pay $25 a month on QuickBooks, but I don't Don't pay any fees on any of the invoices that my clients pay. And they're happy to pay with ACH because they understand, they're small businesses too. They're trying to get their clients to pay ACH. And ACH, by the way, if for anyone who's never been in any kind of banking is a free payment system within us banks, so it's not International, all the banks are in it. And it makes it really easy to get money. That is why I'm a huge fan of QuickBooks. Wave is a different option. It's a free option. So you don't have to pay the 25 bucks a month, but they do charge I think maybe less than a percent on ACH's and then that's standard 2.9/3.5% for credit cards. So I want you when you're trying to look at the the cost of some of these, you have to kind of figure out what it actually will cost in the end, not just the upfront 25 bucks, because if you charge a whole bunch and the payments are costing you a ton, then you're not making any money, you're not coming out ahead. Also there are other ones like Freshbooks or Xero and they all do different things. Freshbooks has other options that QuickBooks doesn't. And it all depends on what you need to do. I think everyone I work with right now is on QuickBooks except for maybe one or two. They are on Wave. They are smaller starting out businesses. If the ACH thing doesn't matter to you, and you can save the 25 bucks, then great stick with Wave. But these are just I'm just trying to give you options for you to go and check out and look and be like, hey, okay. You're right. I need some bookkeeping software. So I'm gonna go check these out.
Okay, next, Zoom. I am still using zoom. It's just where all of my recurring meetings are set up. And frankly, because I haven't any issues. So zoom is video conferencing software. You can have video calls, just like Joan Jetson predicted. I have the paid plan although there is a free plan. You can get two people on the call for an unlimited time. For three plus people. It's you get 40 minutes for free and then over that you'd have to have a paid account. I want to say 15 bucks, I should have checked that before I came on this to record this to see what everything costs you think I know by now. So that's an option. Google Meet is also another option, they have really brought that platform up. So that was another option. There is of course, the classic Skype. Every time I tried to use it, it didn't work for me. So these are options. Go out there, take a look, see what you can do. Because you can do so much.
Like I've said before, or maybe I haven't, my entire business is virtual. I've met one of my clients in person. I've met one of my team members in person. Everything else I've done for the last four years has been virtual. It's all through meetings. It's all through online, my computer is it. You can build everything out. I run other people's businesses from my house and I've never met them. All of these tools have made that possible. And now if you are looking to go from something that was more brick and mortar or from corporate and you're starting out or you were just much more face to face before and now you're having to be virtual, I hope you're you'll kind of take this list and look through there and see what can help you.
Next, LastPass. This may be another, well, this is a huge one on my list as well. When I say these are my favorite tools, I totally mean it. So LastPass (LASTPASS) is an encryption software for passwords. As you can imagine, when you have your own things, you have a billion passwords, passwords every place you've ever shopped online, and then the important stuff like your bank or that kind of stuff. Then you have clients. And then you have more clients and then they have passwords. And I have some I have a client as an affiliate marketer, they have a million passwords, I have to log into all these crazy places to get reporting for things. There are so many passwords and to write them all down have like a notebook on my my desk would be incredibly unsafe like anyone One could walk in my house and just take that what I have is LastPass. You sign up, there's a free version that you could use for yourself. But once you want to start sharing you, I think you have to have the paid version. But it's $3 a month, like it's totally doable. So you can put all of your passwords in there. And then when you get to that website, it will try to like fill it in for you and login. Or you can go into LastPass. And then you can just like launch, whatever that is. So you can launch your bank of america account and it will go to the bank of america website. And then it will, it will fill in the username and the password. And then you can log in from there. You don't have to go and write everything down. Nothing has to be out everything comes up encrypted. So you have one big password for everything else to keep in like a vault. Also very handy to have in their credit card information. My own credit cards are like my own credit card for my businesses in there. That way. I don't have to go into the house try to find my wallet in my purse where my kid probably left it somewhere to go pay a bill if I need to that kind of stuff, bank account information, all of that can be kept in there. It's an encrypted vault. And then you're not leaving things out. Like I used to write things down in my planner, because that's that's great, right? Like, I leave my planner somewhere at the coffee shop or something. And then you know, everyone has the passwords to everything I ever had. Not the smartest idea.
So LastPass is my go to on that. And especially when you have a team or you are going to hire let's say your first VA or you want to have more team members come on, you can then share that password through LastPass. So they get their own LastPass account, you have yours and then you share it with them. You can even not show them the password so they don't have access to even the password but they can it will automatically populate and log them in. That way you can let someone into let's say your zoom account that you want them to update something your availability or whatever it is, you want them to create a meeting for you. You can give them your passwords through LastPass encrypted, they can log in without seeing your password, do the work they need to do. And then as soon as you say, Okay, I don't like this person, or their time with me is done or whatever, you can just unshare it and they will no longer have access to it. Instead of a lot of people will give people passwords, they'll email them. Don't email your passwords, don't email your credit card numbers. People can hack your email very easily. They will send them all this information, right? They'll give them like, I've seen this so many times. I've been given this many times, an Excel spreadsheet with all of the passwords and logins for everything. There's three pages of logins, which is crazy, because if anyone ever got a copy of that just got a link sent to them by accident. They'd be able to log into everything and take like could take your money. Don't do that. The other problem with that is once those passwords are all given out and that person has a copy, you can't undo that. You can't take that knowledge back out. With LastPass, you can unshare and cut that off because they never saw the password anyway, if you have that Excel spreadsheet, that three page long list of passwords, you literally have to go in and change your password on every single one. Now the rest of the team can't get into anything. It's a disaster. LastPass
One other thing that really I think changes, the time spent is a scheduling software. So if you want to go on my website and you say this girl Kelly, she's seems to know what the hell's going on around here. I want to talk to her. You go to my website, you can click on the Discovery call. We can chat for 15 minutes to see if we might be compatible to work together or to see what I offer that kind of thing. You hit a button, it sends you to my Acuity Scheduling where it is linked to my calendar and it knows when I'm available by meetings I have on there. So if I have a meeting at Wednesday at noon, then it won't let anyone book a meeting, then it knows that I'm busy. And then you can book a thing. You go in and say, Okay, well, she's free to 11 o'clock, book it, you get an email confirmation, I get an email knowing that you booked that meeting. And then right before the meeting, you'll get a reminder, you can also send questionnaires, intake forms, you can charge money. So if you are paying for your sessions of whatever you do, let's say, they can take payment there, you can have things signed in there, all that kind of stuff, you know, agree to terms and conditions, all those kind of things can be automated automatically from you. Now, I have like the free discovery call on my website, but I also have other calls. So if you went to buy my strategic mapping program, the business plan and you were going to set up two different calls. I have a specific scheduling link for that kind of thing. It's a specific timeframe and information and different emails get sent out. But I can send you that link, and you'll get all the information you're supposed to get for that kind of appointment. Very little for me to do also saves an enormous amount of time for people going back and forth going "Are you free on Tuesday at 10? No, How about 11 o'clock? Nope. How about Wednesday at four?" Back and forth emails 1000 times, right? Oh, it's awful. They can go in, they can look at your schedule, they can check and see what they have available. And then just pick. No back and forth emails, saves an enormous amount of time. I use Acuity. There's also Calendly. There's a bunch of other ScheduleOnce that gets called. There's a couple other ones, but I I like Acuity.
I kind of in the beginning, I tried out a ton of things. And then you get to a place where you're like, Oh, no, this is my thing. And I'm just sticking with it because it's all set up and it's great and I don't want to move around a bunch. And then as you go, sometimes you're like well, maybe there's something better and then you look around. But I gotta tell you, I tend not to change these days because I have other bigger fish to fry, like, you know, make a podcast.
So, and one of the last ones is Dubsado. What it does is this, you can automate all of your onboarding. You can automate all of your packages. So let's say you're a photographer, you have certain like, offers packages that you want to you want to go. There's a wedding package, there's an engagement photos package, there's a baby photo package, different things. You can have it set up on your website, they can click on a button, they can pick what packages they want, when they're looking to schedule and book, then it directs them to a contract, they can sign the contract, then it gives them an invoice, they can pay the invoice, you get an email that says hey, somebody just paid you a bunch of money. You need to show up at this wedding in July or whatever. It's really really powerful software. They've done an enormous amount of adding on to this, they are always growing. The people that run it seem to be great people, everyone raves about them. This is definitely something to do, especially if you don't want to get a team or you don't want to pay for a lot of help. This can be the automation process, you can be worrying about taking pictures. And then the software is taking your all the people that come to your website, putting them through giving them proposals and contracts and invoices, giving them reminders, sending out different things and you could have all this built out. All of this is done without you being involved. To be completely honest, it is fantastic software that I can't figure out how to use yet. This is a place where most of the other ones, I think all the other ones I have gone in and I've set up from scratch. I've learned how to use it. I'm in the middle of it. I can go in I went in there today, and I'm going to start having guests for the podcast so I had to create a certain kind of appointment in acuity. I know how to do that. I go in there I can set that up. Dubsato, some people totally get it right away, my brain does not work that way. And I have tried, I get really frustrated. And I just say screw it.
This is an instance where if you feel like that, get the person who's really good at it to set it up in like a quarter of a time that it will take you to figure it out. And that's where I am with this. I've kind of been trying to figure out my main core offers what they're going to do for the next half a year, what the rest of 2020 is going to be, and making those offers and figuring things out. Now that I'm 98% sure what I've got on those now I can go in and okay, here Dubsado person, please go set this up for me because I can't figure it out. Now, so many other people think it's so intuitive and they love it and it may be just me.
So one of the other softwares that I am very new to actually is SendOwl. I've seen it used by a couple other people so I figured I'd check it out when I was looking to deliver digital products. So one of the things that I have is a Know Your Numbers Tools package. And it's three tools, it's three Google sheets that are all created for you and formulas and pretty things and then videos to explain how to use a cash projection sheet, and a goal tracker, and a business decision tool. So if someone will go to my website, and they say, hey, this thing looks awesome. I totally want to get my numbers together. They click a button, and they can buy the tools without having to talk to me, right? Because if they want to buy something at 2am, they don't have to wake me up, right? So they can go there. Send owl is the thing that makes all that work. It goes over to send out well, they process everything. They make sure that you get the delivery of all of your sheets, you can pay right there and it's all automated and that's been great. It's 15 bucks a month, which is really pretty cheap. I'm not doing anything now. So all of that's automated. So please, if you'd like to go get your numbers together and go to my website and click on the button, and you'll see all about SendOwl and how it works,. I've seen a lot of other people do it. And there's a lot of things in this list.
I have been googling along the way, I was telling my mom that I am so excited to help other people because I had to learn all this by myself. I didn't really have any other friends that were going through this, I didn't have other I didn't have colleagues. In the beginning. It was like me, going like I've heard of virtual assistants, and maybe I can do this from home. You know, I used to be smart, and I used to do things in work. And I really want to make a business out of this. And it was just all "How do I do this?" I heard from somebody that you could do something like this and just googling the hell out of everything. So I'm hoping that I can cut some of the Google time out for you guys, just by giving you a little insight into what I've done the last four years because a lot of it has been either googling or finding out from other people or If you see somebody doing something, and then reverse engineering, that's how I found SendOwl. I didn't even know about it before I bought somebody else's product. And I saw them send it through there. And I was like, Oh, what is this? I wonder how this works. I wonder if I can afford it. I wonder if I can figure out how to make this work. That's a lot of the ways that I figured it out, too. So if you see somebody else in the marketplace doing something like that, or they're doing something really cool, figure out how they did it. Don't copy their work, but figure out like what software they were using. I found out about Dubsado because all of a sudden I was getting the automated things. And I was like, Oh my god, that's so cool. I didn't have to talk to a person to like wait three days to get a proposal and all that kind of stuff. Or how are they sharing their passwords with me? That was so cool. Or just me wondering how this could be safer because emailing credit card numbers through just regular email was not safe at all, or, or bank account numbers like people giving me the logins to bank accounts and just emailing me like no, no, no, no, no, that's not that safe. So having the encrypted software made everything much safer. And liability wise, I don't want, could you imagine someone goes in logs into their account takes their money like and the last login was like, right after they emailed it to me. We don't want that kind of problems.
So some other ones that I don't have on my website, Gmail, or G Suite, I guess. When you're a big deal, and you get your own website, you get a webmail thing. You have to go into that back end office, and it's terrible. Get G Suite. It's I think, $6 a month. You basically take the website, email, the Kelly at Reynolds OBM. And you put it through G Suite, so it becomes a Gmail account. You get drive, you get sheets and docs and all of the kind of stuff that comes with Gmail. For six bucks a month is so worth it. For someone like me, I now have my whole everyone in my team has their own email everyone has at Reynolds OBM email. I always control all of that all of the documentation stays within the company. It's not just randomly sent out there. That also means I look real and important instead of like kelly@gmail.com. That looks like I'm not serious. So G Suite is a really great thing to have, you can have all the doc sharing, you can have all the collaboration for six bucks a month. Totally worth it. And when you are getting all those SOPs and wonderful processes documented that we've been talking about, put them in Drive, and then you can link to them and share them with your whole team and everyone will be able to know what's going on and you can go to the beach.
What else do I have for you? We have the, the you know, the Excel, the word, the docs, the sheets, that kind of stuff, the spreadsheets, those are all I'm sure you guys have all used those in corporate figuring, you know, all that ready. Use tools if you can, to save some money, save some time. Maybe That's the way you stay small. If you want to stay small, if you just want it to be you or maybe one other person, then that other person can help you do this stuff or just come in, set things up and they'll let you use them. Or to make things so much easier, maybe you're getting the same work done, that used to do in 10 hours in 4 hours, and then take six hours and either work harder or go to the beach, whatever you want to do. I think a lot of these tools, there's no way I could keep track. No way I could keep track of everything that happened to my business without Teamwork. My own stuffs in there. For last year, I put my garden in there, it didn't work as well for my garden because I used to get mud on my phone, but I keep everything in there. Everything, everything, all those little things that you've always forget, you're like, Oh, damn, I totally forgot about that. Put them in there. And then just have a monthly once a month they come up and they go ding go in there and clean this up or download your bank statements or whatever the thing is that always gets forgotten that What the project management software is for. That kind of stuff helps me. So all of these things I mean, project management software keeps me on track. QuickBooks keeps my life running because the money comes in. If you don't get paid, your business is going to be screwed. LastPass, I know where all my passwords were, I'm not searching for things through notebooks and Excel spreadsheets. Zoom, I can meet up with my clients. Acuity all those people get to just make appointments with you, and then it moves along, you don't have to go back and forth. Also, I have found that people will probably not email you cold to say I'd like to set up an email. But if they can book a call, and it's all automated, it's much easier for them to click the button. So keep that in mind. Dubsado getting all of those onboarding things, all the contracts, all that kind of stuff automated. You can do forms and there's a ton of other things. You can invoice there recurring invoices and do the same invoice every month, you can set those up in there. SendOwl if you have a digital product ebooks things like that. You can have those automated too, so that you can send those out and keep making money while you're sleeping. And one last thing, especially if you are working outside of your house, it's so very useful inside your house, even if you have an encrypted router, but something like Tunnelbear, I use Tunnel bear, but a VPN. I don't know what those letters stand for off the top of my head. Someone can fill this in for me later on the comments, but it is encrypted to protect your computer so if you're at a coffee shop, no one can get on the free Wi Fi and then get onto your computer. It blocks it and makes it safe. There's someone who's definitely if you go Google VPN, some will explain that better than I will but it's important and if you are traveling or you work frequently on free Wi Fi, definitely get it. It will protect your computer, especially like I am working in people's accounts, their bank accounts I don't want that information being able to be stolen cause that would suck.
Okay, so we went through a whole bunch of things I think I just rambled on about a whole bunch of things that I love that have saved me an enormous amount of time and money and energy, and frustration and I hope that one or all of these will help you with the same save you a little sanity. If you go to my website, ReynoldsOBM.com/favorite-tools, you will see all of these, there are affiliates, which means I could make, I don't know four or five cents or something like that. I can make a couple dollars. So if you make any purchases from there, I have to give that disclaimer but they'll all be in there and but all of them are listed there and they'll give you a little bit of what everything is about and why I love them so much.
One word of caution, especially if you're a geek like me and you love finding a new way, efficient, fun way to do it. Don't get bogged down and playing with 1000 of these things. You are not from PC Magazine, you are not doing an in depth report on five different project management softwares. You can get way deep down, and then be so lost in what you want. But I like this thing, what I like this thing over here, it does not matter. We're trying to find something that works for us and move on and keep going. Do not spend 27 hours in a weekend, going back and forth between project management software. I tell you this from experience, I've spent way too much time trying to figure out the best thing to use the very best and reading a ton of reviews and figuring it all out. Try things out. You don't like them, you can move them. Most of these programs have Import Export features. So try it out but don't, don't lose your mind. Okay. Check them out, see what can help. If it's not for you right now, then move on to something else. But I hope at least one of these can save you a little bit of time and some money and some stress. And for all of you out there getting hit hard, we're thinking of you and keep up the good work. I know you can do it. We're going to pull out of this. We're not going to panic. I know you want to panic right now, but there's no panic here. I'll see you next week. Bye.