When you own a small business, you have to wear many hats. Some days you serve as a savvy marketer and utilize social media to drive engagement with your customers. Other days you are a front line worker, assisting your customers on the sales floor. And then there are the days you have to be a financial guru and dive into payroll, taxes, and more. It's exciting to be a small business owner; however, it can be hard to wear all those hats. Which is why it is so important to utilize as many tools and resources at your disposal to make life easier. Check out our list to help you juggle all the responsibilities that come with being an entrepreneur.
Money Smart for Small Business is a practical financial education program related to starting and managing a business, created by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA). The program features various modules with topics ranging from managing cash flows to record keeping and tax planning to financial management.
The SBA is a great resource for any small business owner. Their website features a learning center with courses, guides, and handy tools.
With the complexities that come with owning a business, CorTrust Bank has tools for cash management to help make it all simple. Our online service can save you time, increase cash flow, streamline cash management, allows for ACH origination, remote deposit capture, and more. Contact your local CorTrust banker to learn more.
This is a free online service that can serve as your file hosting mechanism. Dropbox allows you to create folders and upload documents, images, and large files. Long gone are the days of utilizing a USB drive to transfer files from one computer to another - you now have Dropbox. It also comes in handy when you need to email a large file that exceeds the limit. Simply share your Dropbox link with your email recipient.
If you are like most small business owners you have a presence on social media, making this tool very beneficial. Bitly allows you to condense long, complicated links for free. Instead of sharing extremely lengthy URLs on social media, you can share a nice, clean URL through condensing it in Bitly. Even better, Bitly reports how many people clicked on your link and from what source.
There are several affordable email marketing tools that you can use to communicate with your followers. Providers such as Constant Contact allow you to create emails from already created templates, making it very user friendly. Plus, you can embed a sign-up form on your website to collect more subscribers - that's a win-win!
While it can be a challenge to wear so many hats as a small business owner, you can do it effortlessly with these inexpensive (and mostly free) tools and resources.