Ep. 42 - Investing in Software for Your Business

Support the show: https://bit.ly/DigitalWrapUp

In this week's episode of the Digital Wrap-Up, Riley discusses the importance and value of investing in software for your small business.

Spending money as a small business owner can be challenging when you don't see an immediate return. When talking about software, you don't always see an immediate monetary return, but the investment is well worth it - if you do your research and spend your money on the RIGHT software.

That's one lesson Riley has learned in his time as being a small business owner.

Why is it so important to invest in software? At the core of it, most software is designed to make your job easier in one way or another. Whether it automates a task that would take you twice as long to complete or simplifies your business processes to free up more of your time, software is your friend and it's worth the investment.

Harden Digital & Design now spends nearly $800 on software alone each month. But Riley says he can't imagine what running the business would be like if he didn't have each one of those softwares.

Most of the software he uses daily. If not daily, at least every week. In this episode, Riley breaks down all the different software Harden Digital & Design pays for on a monthly basis to give you a glimpse into why he believes investing in software is so valuable.

Follow Harden Digital & Design on #socialmedia: 

Twitter: @hardendigital
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HardenDigital
Instagram: @harden_digital
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/harden-digital/

Transcript

Riley Harden: 0:24

Welcome back to another episode of the digital wrap up. My name is Riley and I'm the host, and I'm the CEO and digital director, pardon digital InDesign. In today's episode, I'm going to talk about investing in your business and more specifically investing in software to help your business grow. But before I do that, I just want to take a second to let you know you can directly support the digital wrap up now by going to bit.li/digital Wrap up, and that is bi t.li/digital. Wrap up, and digital wrap up all in uppercase, the D, the W and the U in digital wrap up. Your support for the show goes a long way helps us both myself and Kaylee who's on the show a lot. And Hannah will be on the show or the podcast more often to just put more time and effort into the podcast so that we can create better content, and share some more tips and tricks for you to help you as a business owner, social media manager, graphic designer, whatever it may be. So your support for the show goes a long way. So let's go ahead and get into today's episode, the topic can kind of came about when I was reading an article earlier about some pain points for small businesses. It's something that there was a survey done in this article, and kind of asking, Hey, what are the the biggest pain points for small businesses, which what we work with a lot and what we are, you know, really local, small businesses? What are those points that are those pain points that are stopping you from growing and really succeeding. And so out of the people, the small businesses surveyed 35% of what's most affecting them is attracting customers. And then an additional 34% is increasing brand awareness. So that raises red flags to me right away. It's like, Well, hey, that's exactly what we're here to help with at heart and digital and design. But it is really a struggle for small businesses. It's even a struggle for us. Sometimes. We didn't have a set up sales. I don't not a policy, but we had no real sales network going for the longest time it was just local referrals, family, friends, whatever it may be. And then it's great until those run up are those dry out. But how do you continuously attract new customers? How are you continuously getting in front of new potential leads and things like that? And kind of following up on those pain points that was asking which tools have helped you the most with overcoming overcoming those different pain points. And the number one tool? Well, it's kind of like multiple tools. But the number one tool was social media. Big surprise, you know, that's that's all social media is there to do is increase your brand awareness and get you in front of potential customers. So you know, it's not necessarily we're talking kind of about investing in software. I guess I should say this episode, kind of partially about social media kind of partially about investing in small business or in software to help your small business, they kind of go hand in hand in a way but it's on the social media side of things, you can do it all completely for free. You don't have to invest money into creating content and scheduling posts and things like that. And you know, I just got done or just got back to the office from talking with a group of nonprofits here in Tipton. And you know, my number one advice for people and when they say, Oh, we don't have time to be on social media every single day creating content, that type of stuff. It's always my number one piece of advice is schedule your post, you know, spend an hour or two, one day a week and create all of your content for the week. It's as simple as that you set it, you create it you set it and then you don't have to go back and oh, it's Wednesday I need to jump on social media even though I have this meeting to run to. So that's all that all can be done for free. You know you're working so it's you know, time is money but you Don't have to invest in super fancy software to be doing that type of stuff. There is software out there that helps, which I'll talk about kind of the software that we use here shortly. But essentially, besides the time that you're putting into it, you can be utilizing the full value of social media completely for free. And that's a time investment when you're talking about investments and your business and everything, but it's completely worth it, you absolutely need to be on social media, and it does solve some of those pain points. There's obviously other things to do with advertising and networking events, and all this other stuff to kind of increase your brand awareness and attract new customers, but social media is something everybody can do. And so that's the first place to start. One of the other tools that the survey, or people who responded to this survey said, was a CRM, a customer relation, relation management system. And that's kind of like, you know, a communication system, sales software, whatever it may be, how are you managing your interactions with your customers or your, your leads and things like that. And this is something that we didn't have, for the longest time here at heart and digital design. We didn't have a way of tracking incoming leads, or really doing anything outbound sales at all is, like I said, it was all referrals. And it's something that we that I invested in a little bit with HubSpot, so we use HubSpot here, at heart and digital design, it's been great so far, really dug into it, in January of this month to start, you know, focusing on the sales side of the business. And it's great CRM software, you know, has our Contact Us form we created in HubSpot, and then we embedded it on our website. So anytime somebody fills out a form on our website, it automatically puts them into our HubSpot CRM. So then it assigns me as a contact, and then I know I need to go in and call them. And there's just so many different things that you can do through this CRM that's really helps automate a bunch of processes and keeps you on track for what you need to be doing as a business to effectively grow and scale. You know, we're still in the infant stages of it. But we're taking it up a notch each week with putting in new leads and tracking our sales calls while I'm doing a lot of the sales, which is I wanted to do, but it's now we have a process in place to be doing all of this stuff. And so that's one of the investments in software that us here at heart and digital design are purposely doing because we find value in it. And the great thing. So like you're thinking how much does this cost and HubSpot is great because we have all these integrations, you know, it's the very low end package. But for what we need, it's perfect. And it's $50 a month for everything. You know, now you look at the next package up though, and then you're getting to like $800 a month in HubSpot. So we lucked out, we got all this stuff for the $50 a month package. And it's been great. But you're definitely if you're a bigger scale or you have more defined sales process and things like that, you're likely spending a little bit more 50 bucks for us, it's definitely worth it. It automates a lot of stuff and keeps helps me keep on track with the things I'm doing on the sales side of things. I guess to kind of define our sales process, it's not great by any means, but it's more than just waiting for people to reach out to us is that we, each week, each of us, Hannah, myself and Kaylee put in at least two new leads that we're organically searching out for that it's not people that have reached out to us or anything it's people we want to pursue and reach out to talk to that we think would be a good fit for our business then whether it's graphic design services, social media website, whatever it may be, we have a steady flow of leads coming in just by us inputting them then of course we have the people like I said that submit forms on our website. But that's we're not running ads trying to get form submissions or anything like that. So it was you know, always hit or miss if people are actually filling out forms and we're getting new leads that way. So then we take that and I reach out to them whether it's an email or phone call, by i log all this stuff. If and you know, how'd the sales call go? What was the outcome? Did they answer? Do I need to follow up? If they didn't answer and I don't have contact with a specific lead in the system, then I have a filter where it sends me notification. If I haven't had contact with them for seven business or seven regular days or five business days, whatever it is basically a week. And then it prompts me to follow up with them. Hey, just sending you a reminder email. Did you see this? Can you set up time to get coffee or, or meet with us to talk about what we can do to help you. And that's kind of like our sales process at the moment. It's nothing grand by any means. And I'm sure there's probably people out there like, wow, that's really bare bones and not automated, whatever it may be. But we're having more success. That way. We're about to meet here. With somebody in tipped in about a magazine for this, the city or the county. And that came through us being proactive and reaching out and doing this stuff through HubSpot. So that$50, a month through HubSpot has been I mean, it's already paid for itself, I think at least a couple of times maybe this year. So it's definitely worth it to invest there. But you know, when we're talking about these software's whether it's HubSpot, or any other CRM, or you know, the social media is kind of different. There's an interesting statistic in this same survey, the same study that I was looking at. And just to read from it real quick, it says small business owners who invested $600 monthly into their business software generated on average $4,000 More in monthly revenue than small business owners who only invested $400 a month. So think about that. The jump from $400 to $600 a month, on average, there's a $4,000 monthly or $4,000 increase in revenue per month. That's pretty incredible. The 200, spending an extra $200, whether that's paying for an upgraded CRM package, or your social media software package, so that you can schedule out all these posts, you know, social media is that number one tool for solving those pain points. So whatever that extra couple $100 A month may be, or these businesses on average are making an extra$4,000. That's 100% worth the investment. I'm not the best numbers guy, but I think it makes sense there on that end. And you know, just though another statistic, just over 50% of small business owners returned a profit within a year of investing in their business software. So more than 50% of people who are investing are returning a profit within a year. So you know, all these different software's they were using their making up for whether it's clients on retainer for us or one off projects, you know, if we land this magazine project that pays for HubSpot for the entire year, essentially. So that's 100% and worth it. And then the I guess this is kind of reiterating the other point over 30% of small business owners cited social media as the most essential tool for their business success. That's kind of just like validation. I'm not trying to like brag or anything, but that's just like validation for what we do here at Hearn digital InDesign is that for small businesses, social media can be the most effective tool in your toolkit. It's something I say frequently, I think it's even on our websites literally the most effective tool for you. And that was before this study or survey that I'm reading here. That's what I've just always believed because there's so much value in reaching local customers through social media. And so going back to the numbers thing and the, the software that we use here at heart and digital design to give you just a breakdown of like, okay, this is how much we spend on software each month. HubSpot, we've already covered 50 bucks a month great deal. Gets us all the different packages combined into one beginner starter package, which is perfect for us. We spend you know, $18 a month on MailChimp MailChimp sends out every time we post a blog, or post to a podcast episode MailChimp, pulls from an RSS feed and automatically sends out the next morning every time we sends out an email the next morning after we post a blog to our website. So that's an automation step there that's getting more people to our website. That's just something I you set up once and every time you post something it goes so that's well worth $18 I'm gonna save the big one for last. But other things we use. Besides MailChimp, oh, QuickBooks, QuickBooks has been a huge help. And I think that's another $50 a month for the package that we use. But QuickBooks is what we do all of our invoicing in, and pretty much all of our accounting here. So every time we bill a customer, they're okay one off exceptions where we still send the PDF invoice for people that we know are paying checks. But every time we build a customer, it's through QuickBooks, so they get sent to digital invoice, they can pay directly through the link in the email, just insert their credit card info, I know some of them, you can set up where this saves your info. So they just get the email each month and click Pay and boom, it's good to go. And besides the invoice inside of things that keeps track of all the different bank accounts, the different credit cards for the business, all this stuff and kind of shows you the profit, the loss, all this accounting stuff that would be a lot harder to keep track of manually, it pulls all this information in. And it is really our accounting software's to so invoicing and accounting for 50 bucks a month. We're not doing anything fancy, we don't have a bunch of loans to keep track of or I don't even know. But the accounting side of things for us is pretty straightforward. and QuickBooks helps us just keep it all in one place, and automates it all and everything like that. So that's 100 bucks, or 50 bucks a month, well worth it there. If you're not doing some type of automated accounting. Or if you're not don't want to pay an accountant, I can understand that because it's expensive. But for now, QuickBooks is perfect for us. And it will be you know, until we become a multimillion dollar business in the future, hopefully. But that that's probably the one we use the most QuickBooks and HubSpot to specifically for the business side of things the back end of the business. unlikely for getting another one Canva we pay for just kind of great. It's very cheap for what we use it for QuickBooks, MailChimp. I think that's the real. Pretty much it for the back end of the business. The one that we spend the most money on by far is our social media management tool. We use Agora Pulse your heart and digital and design. It's something that I did a lot of research into when deciding on which software to use, because to give you some background we use, I used HootSuite a lot. And my previous job with the state. It was great the free tool at this at the time through HootSuite allowed you to schedule 30 posts at a time across all the different platforms. So that was plenty you could schedule out a week's worth of content just fine. And who HootSuite well, about the time that I was actually making the switch from working for the state and then starting running the business full time HootSuite drastically reduced their free package to where you can only do five posts across all platform being scheduled. That's clearly not going to work. That's, you know, we have four social media platforms that we're on. So you have one post a week, or one post plus, or one post per platform plus an additional one that you can schedule, they can be scheduled at the same time. So you're really not able to schedule out more than a day in advance. So that wasn't worth it to keep that free package whenever I switched to full time, hard and digital. So I put a lot of long story short, put a lot of work into research into which package or which software would be best for what we're doing. And I'll tell you straight up that social media management tools are not cheap. You know the big ones out there of Agora Pulse. Geez. Don't draw a blank right now. Let me figure this out. Great podcasting on my end, Hootsuite buffer buffers, the pretty common one. Sprout Social that was the other big one. So Agora Pulse buffer, Sprout Social. Those are pretty the high end software's the tools that They are pretty big out there in the social media management world. And so I was really considering the, the differences between Agora Pulse and Sprout Social, Hootsuite, they have obviously like a bigger packages paid packages, but what they they're the back end how it all looked the usability, it just wasn't as clean and sharp as what Sprout Social and Agora Pulse were. So I really narrowed it down to Agora Pulse and Sprout Social, they're very similar, the pricing is very similar. But there were just some small interesting intricacies about, you know, you have a base number of profiles that you can add. And then each additional profile that you add from your package, whatever package you have cost an extra $11 a month or something like that. So in the end, after a lot of research into that, I settled on agorapulse, because it's everything we needed. And it was just like, like, I'm talking like just a few dollars cheaper a month, it will like for the similar type packages. And I think we got a little more out of agorapulse, a couple more profiles that we could have on the package before really spending more money. So that was well, well worth the investment there to go with Agora Pulse. And so I mean, I'll tell you straight up, Agora Pulse is over$380 a month, I think for us right now, which you're like, that's crazy, I know. But when we're managing so many accounts that we different that we do for all of our different clients, you have to think it's based on a profile, how many profiles you're managing, not just clients. So each client has, you know, on average two to three, sometimes even four different social media profiles. So that's for per one client. And then you know, we have our zone there, too. So that's another four, and it starts to add up really quickly. So then that's when you really get into the add ons of$11 per month per extra profile. So it is very expensive. But I I honestly don't know how we'd manage all these accounts that we do without it. So it's 100% worth that investment. And when you're talking almost $400 a month, it's like crazy to think that I'm spending that much money on something but I feel like physically don't know how we would do it. Just way too hard to keep track of everything else. You know, you have the business suite for Facebook and Instagram. But then you'd have to go to a different platform to schedule out on Twitter and then a different platform to schedule that on LinkedIn. Well, Agora Pulse, we can do that all and they've even had a tick tock so that's great. Absolutely love Agora Pulse, not sponsored by them. And but if they want to sponsor us, Sure, great. That'd be sweet. But you know, it's just one of those things that you have to invest in. I know, there's probably other software's out there for other small business owners who are listening that, you know, they don't need the social media software. But there's some other software that's essential or not necessarily essential, but it makes your life a whole lot easier. And you're going to pay big bucks for some of these, but I don't think like this study was saying, if you really want to be able to scale and grow, you kind of just have to make that investment and bite the bullet and spend the extra money because it's worth it. Frankly, like, Agora Pulse is a no brainer to me. HubSpot. I was kind of hesitant about for a while. Because we didn't have the sales need, or I didn't think we had the sales need for the longest time but 50 bucks a month. That's like nothing for when you compare and look at their other packages that are like $800 a month. So really got a deal there. You know, QuickBooks is essential. I can't imagine running the the back end of the business without it, I'd be absolutely screwed and be a full time accountant for the business if we didn't have QuickBooks managing it for us. So I think that when you're trying to when you're looking at all these different software's and processes for your business as a small business owner, it's hard to make the commitment To purchase some of these and pay it month to month, because you're like, yes, you could get away with not using these different software's like QuickBooks or HubSpot, and things like that. But in the long run, you're going to be spending a lot more time working on these things that the software's automate for you. And then you're not going to be able to do other things, like focus on your customers focus on your clients, or do the actual work that's required of the business to make money. So it's something that I was reading this article, and it was just like, Yeah, it really hit home to me that you do have to make the investment, it's kind of, it's kind of like almost running ads in a way, you're gonna have to pay for it upfront, and which sucks, but on the in the long run, it's going to be well worth the money. If you set up your ads correctly, I will throw that caveat in there. But you know, just making these small investments, or sometimes big investments in your business, you have to do it to succeed. And, you know, take, it's not software specific, but take our office that we opened up here and tipped in, you know, spending almost $800 a month that was like, Holy crap, that's a lot of money. Yes, that's, that is a lot of money. Now you're looking at over 400 and software, closer to five, it's really almost like that 600 mark in software plus, you know, 100, and rent and all this stuff. And it's like, you know, there's a ton of expenses just in the business itself. But you have to do it, there's no way around it. And something I'm learning more about as a small business owner, obviously, I don't have a business background, which I don't think a lot of small business owners go to business school, and then our small business owners they have, they have this idea that something that's exciting to them something they want to do. And then they come up with it, and start developing it. And then all of a sudden, they're a small business owner, and they have no idea, the back end of the business processes. What do we do here for accounting? And how do we put this out on social media and all this other stuff. And these softwares are meant to help you and so invested in them is well worth the time. But it's just something when I saw this article, I wanted to jump on and talk about a little bit. And hopefully, if you're on the fence about, Hey, should I invest in this business, process this software, whatever it may be, nine times out of 10, it's going to be worth it, do your research, find the one that's best for you, and make sure it does everything you need before investing in, you know, you don't want to pay for a year upfront for it to be something that it's not actually beneficial for you a lot of times these software's and these programs offer free week trials and things like that. So definitely do the trials, try it out. And see if it's something that you like, yeah, I can implement this in my business. And it'll help us in the long run, even if I'm going to not make as much money until the process starts getting automated and paying for itself. So I think that's it for today's episode kind of all over the place talking about social media, and small business, you know, combining the two topics that this podcast is really about. So hopefully, if you're listening, you got some value. And if you're on the fence, just go for it, do your research, but go for it likely will help your business in the long run. So kind of wrap things up here, as I like to do on the digital wrap up. I don't think I'll ever get over that using that pun. But again, your support, like I was saying at the beginning of the show, your support goes a long way for the podcast. So check out bitly.com or BI T dot L y slash digital wrap up and you can directly support the show with small monetary value each month of three to $10 whatever you want it to be that just goes directly to paying for equipment paying for software, throw in the mix, the software that we use to you know, the Adobe software to create stuff and the software to run this podcast and things like that side notes tangent there. But yeah, the money that that goes through the support the subscription to the digital wrap up will go directly to supporting the show for the long run. So our 40 Plus episodes in and doing better about staying on track with an episode each week and hopefully more content to come. Social media, small business graphic design websites all that coming your way soon. And yeah be on the lookout for the next episode of the digital wrap up and until then, hope you start enjoying spring weather soon. I know it's raining here but spring is just around the corner. So have a great day.