In today’s video, I’m showing you the specific paid tools we use each month to run a remote branding and web design studio. Let’s dive in.
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So I’ve got my phone up here. I just wanna walk through the tools I use.
This is a free app which you can download to aggregate your bills. You just add your credit card—the different cards you have that are part of your business. So specify this based on your business.
What it’ll do is aggregate all those and tell you the subscription dates, when things are coming out, and what’s due. It’ll even give you an accrual of everything: all of your subscriptions for one year, and the tools that you use on a monthly basis.
So what I wanted to do was kinda just go through these different tools here that we use in the business. So for a quick overview, what I like to do is go into Truebill, and I’ll go through it and just check out this content.
So for example, I can go here and I can see—okay, well I know on the 4th I got the Squadcast podcast subscription coming out. I know I’ve got Zoom, Flywheel, we still have some grandfather Wordpress site that we still work on—Hiscox is our business insurance, Adobe Creative Cloud—which actually should be removed ‘cause we’ve migrated a lot of our efforts to Webflow. All of the assets and tools that we’re using as part of the business are aggregated here.
So this can provide you with an overall view of the tools that you’re using each month, what you’re spending on those subscriptions—and what I’ll do every quarter is I’ll go through all these transactions and I’ll say, “Okay, where can we trim the fat? What are things that we can get rid of that we’re not necessarily using?”
Now, what I like to do also is just hit All. When I hit All, it’ll just show me all of the subscriptions that we have for the year, segmented by type. So for the business, we have Hootsuite, Freshbooks—you know, normal stuff—GoDaddy, LogMeIn—which is LastPass, the password protection tool that we use.
When you’re running your own agency, it’s a lot easier to run these subscriptions ‘cause a lot of these services do have free versions, and I’m able to see all of my active subscriptions here.
Now I do wanna show you some of those tools also. So let me just close this out, and I’m gonna open up my browser here so y’all can see what I’m talking about and just go over some of these monthly tools that we use in the business.
Zoom is what we use for video conferencing with clients and team members. We pay about $15 a month for this.
Then we also have Flywheel. So we have about 6 or 7 Wordpress clients that we’ve had for a very long time that are still hosted through Flywheel. I like Flywheel because we are able to host those sites, and the team at Flywheel will update the plugins, make sure sites are working properly, and send us any issues that we might have.
It’s also important to have business insurance. As a business owner, when you grow your efforts, you wanna make sure you protect yourself and your team.
Hiscox is great for small business. Next Insurance is another one that works really well.
Zapier is for all our third-party integrations. We use it to connect apps and automate workflows.
As you know, this is our accounting software. We have a CPA on our team that does our bookkeeping, but I like to watch and see these transactions come in from Freshbooks. It’s also easy for me to track with the team, and we’re also able to send invoices and get them paid via clients using Freshbooks.
For my online courses and items—it’s funny, I’m on the homepage of Podia, which is amazing. They’re platform’s really, really cool. We use it for digital downloads, online courses.
This one, I’m paying about $35 a month for.
Let me go back. Zapier, we’re paying about a few hundred, just because we do a lot of zaps for our clients and we’re hosting they’re websites. So we’re paying around $300 for Zapier.
For Hiscox, we’re paying about $150-175 per month. Flywheel, we’re paying about $250 per month. And for Zoom, we’re paying about $15.
Now don’t let this feel daunting if you’re a smaller agency. A lot of these tools, you won’t need.
For Hiscox, you can probably get a smaller premium for less than $100. For Zapier, you might end up spending around between $20-30. So this is all scaled based on your agency’s revenue.
Webflow is our hosting, so we host about 40 clients, and they pay us a monthly fee. We update their blogs and make sure they’re websites are up-to-date. The great thing about Webflow is they’re pretty low maintenance, so we’re really doing like new pages and new content for their site based on what’s needed.
For Slack—and this is so funny—we just started paying for Slack. We were using the free version for a very long time, but since we have other agency clients that we collaborate with, we do need the paid version to be able to bring them into our platform.
Mailchimp is another one we use. This is a great tool—especially for up-and-coming agencies. It’s free, I think, for up to 2500 subscribers.
Let me make sure, ‘cause I don’t know if the pricing structure has changed. So here, it’s free, you have up to—it doesn’t even say how many subscribers, but I’m pretty sure it’s around 2500. So this is another tool we pay for.
Now we do pay around $300 a month for Mailchimp, because we do have almost 40,000 subscribers. So that’s probably one of our higher tier monthly subscriptions.
deel is for our international team. We only pay for it when we pay out our team members. We pay about $50 per transaction, per team member, and we pay out on a bi-weekly basis. And again, our team is solid, small, and cohesive.
For our stateside employees, we use gusto for managing our HR and team members.
This is our prototyping tool that we design efforts in for clients. We’re spending about $60 here.
Then, of course, we have Notion, which manages our knowledgebase. We have all of our client details and information here.
So I do wanna bring out my phone again because this is gonna give you an overview of what we’re spending on here. So if you sign up for Truebill and add those specific cards that are tailored to your business, it’ll have your subscriptions here. So we’re spending about $5100 a year on our subscriptions—that doesn’t include team member payouts and compensation.
So I always recommend this to agency owners—especially if you’re building out your agency: you probably already have accounting software and you probably have a CPA that’s doing your bookkeeping. But it’s a great idea to add your subscriptions or your accounts in here, so you can keep track of what’s going on and be able to trim the fat.
‘Cause I’ve saved thousands, literally, by going through this each quarter. I go to my calendar, I add it and I say, “Hey, this is the day I spend 2 hours just going through all of our tools and making sure that we’re up to par, and that we’re not paying for any tools that we might not necessarily need.”
