Tools We Use Every Day In Our Small Business

Lately we have been on the bandwagon to convince people that it IS possible to start your own business. Starting our business, The Climb Collaborative, was one of the best career moves I made in my life. But it took me a long time to see it that way. 

I was so convinced I was a “worker” with corporate career goals that I created my whole identity around that, but really I was lost. 

We were never taught the skills growing up to start a business, everything we learnt and all the “career readiness” they put us through was centred around getting a job in a company, not running one yourself. 

Even when we started The Climb Collaborative, I felt like I was never confident enough to say I was a business owner, it was just a “side hustle” or “little passion project”. I was scared to admit that I wasn’t following the path I had originally set for myself. 

I have learnt a lot about myself and my business over the last few years. 

I know what I want. 

I know what I love. 

I know what environment I thrive in. 

I know what I will tolerate and what I won’t. 

And for me that looks like working 10 hours some days, late nights, early mornings and making space for clients after putting the kids to bed. 

It also looks like taking a walk in the middle of the day when my energy is low, planning my months around what is happening in my personal life and family and going camping whenever we want. 

I have created the perfect balance, of pushing myself and working hard when I need to and also switching off when I need to. 

This came after putting the work in from the beginning, and never giving up. But if I can do it, through covid, a twin pregnancy, two newborns with reflux and colic and all the rest. You can do it too. 

Ready to start your own business?

Here are the tools we use every day to make this business owner life a little simpler.

Xero

I know, I know for some of us finance isn’t fun. But hear me out and let’s get the financial side of things out of the way.

We started out business using Xero from the beginning, we jumped on to that subscription and have never stopped. It felt like a big commitment, even at only around $30 a month, to start paying for software when we could just make invoices in Canva and put our business bank account details on it?

Well let me tell you I am so glad we started with Xero right from the beginning, even when we only made $15,000 for the whole first financial year. We now have insights from the very start of our business. We can see our growth, we were sending professional invoices with automated follow ups right from the beginning, and we haven’t had to then make big changes and learn how to use accounting software when we were starting to take off and were super busy! We had already nailed our process, things were automated and we were on track to keep growing.

Canva

Ok we use Canva EVERY DAY. While we are hands down ADOBE everything when it comes to professional design and creating branding for our clients, we can not go past Canva for social media graphics, internal documents, website graphics, heck we even use it for printing and AI (move over ChatGPT).

If you arent’ on the Canva bandwagon yet, jump on now.

Need training on how to use it? Book a 1:1 session with Ash and she will teach you all her tips and tricks.

Google Workspace

Welcome to our whole world, kidding but in all serious we LOVE Google Workspace. We host our professional email hello@theclimbcollaborative.com.au on Google Workspace and use the massive amount of tools Google has to offer.

Scheduling? Google Calendar

Online Video Meetings? Google Meet

Documents? Google Docs

Storage? Google Drive

Collaboration? Shared Google Drives

Messaging? Google Chat

The list goes on but these are the first that come to mind. If you are looking for a platform to manage EVERYTHING. Google Workspace is hands down our favourite.

If you have any questions about how we use these tools, or want some training in how to use them yourself, contact Ash!

We are all about transparency, so we are just letting you know that this post contains affiliate links. This means we might get a little kickback (that will go towards Ash’s next coffee hit) from these companies if you sign up using our links. But you won’t be charged anything extra we promise, if anything you might get a little discount.