How to keep track of everything in your business

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Summary

It’s best to keep everything in one place, a single source of truth, rather than having data scattered across notes, Post-Its, and files. A CRM is often the best solution, but project management tools or task managers can work depending on how you work. Changing your workflow will always have teething problems, but once you’re over the hump you’ll kick yourself for not doing it sooner.

Raw

When you work for yourself, over the years, you come to create a workflow for yourself, the way you work.

When I work with clients, many of them ask me, how do I keep track of everything? How do they keep track of things? How can they make life easier for themselves? Because data, it’s all over the place. It’s on notepad, it’s on Post-It notes and so on.

Obviously, they do use a computer. But even on the computer, they have files all over the place. How can they keep track of stuff? Obviously, if you’re a coach, you need to keep track of that client. Well, if you’re a coach or a consultant, you need to keep track of information, data, communications, files, basically everything for that client somehow.

As I said, many of them have it all over the place. And the whole point of single source of truth is making sure that there is one place that you go to to get that information rather than all over the place.

There are many tools that do this. There are task managers. There are CRMs. There are project management tools. So it really depends on how you work as to what would work best for you.

For some, a project management tool is perfect. Now, another client that I have actually who does basically the same thing as this other first client, the project management tool didn’t work for them. It just didn’t gel with them. So we moved them over to a CRM.

Generally, a CRM is probably the best solution for everybody. But in some instances, it’s best to just use a task manager or a project management tool. But if you want to keep track of absolutely everything in one place, i.e. e.m. contact data, blah, blah, blah. Yes, you can do it with task managers and project management tools, which is what I was doing for many, many years.

But I realised there was something missing. So for me and for a lot of clients, using a CRM is the perfect tool. And if it integrates with what you’re already using, obviously I use Apple products and that’s what I consult on, then the best one is the thing that works for that tool, right? There’s no point getting another at all if it doesn’t interface with what you already have.

And that single source of truth for me is invaluable because I can just literally go to that one place and everything is there. Client communication is there. The projects are there. The timeline is there. The tasks are there. And everything in the future is there. So my calendar is there.

So having one place where you can go and get everything is the ideal utopia of any business. However, many businesses don’t do that. That’s why they hire me or hire someone else to make that for them.

But you have to understand that you’re changing your workflow. So you’re going to have teething problems at the beginning. It just happens. I’ve done this for 30 years. I know what’s going on. But once it happens, you’re over that hump, which actually doesn’t take too long. You kick yourself as to why didn’t I do this before, because this is what I hear from my clients basically, like, shit, I should have done this before. In fact, I did it myself so when I moved Oza to CRM. Anyway, single source of truth make sure that you have everything in one place you can go to that one place and get every piece of information for that client or for yourself in that place. It’s so simple, it’s stupid simple.

Anyway, have a great day, and I’ll see you in the next one. Ciao.